Are you more interested in making a game or learning to program games? It also might be helpful to express what your short and long term goals are. If you have a dream game you'd like to work on sometime "relatively" soon (even in small pieces) my suggestion is you start getting familiar with the unreal engine (just doing simple things like loading a mesh,displaying it and playing an animation) since it uses C++ and something called blueprints. If not (or perhaps at the same time) a simple pong or breakout game using SFML and c++ would be wise to get some experience implementing the things that are taken care for you in unreal and the basic things involved in game programming like a game loop and timing. I haven't looked at unreal so I don't know if things like pathfinding are built in or not but in terms of things you should look into are pathfinding, collision detection, timing, input handling and others. Here a page that has some pathfinding and other resources: http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/gameprog.html Good Luck.
Where do I start? (C++)
If you want to make a 2D game you could always try Construct 2. It's event based and you don't have to write difficult code. I'm not going to rain on your parade, and don't know your education, so I'll use my own as an example. I've had the same dream, but writing code is really hard. For me I dropped out of high-school, eventually here only a couple of years ago got my g.e.d, but have also learned more math due to my new interests than I ever did in school. I've been programming for many years, and crashed many projects. I have to say I'm STILL not smart enough to code in ANY heavy language. No game is coming out of me in C++, COCOS 2D, or the such. I've just accepted I'm not smart enough. You gotta know tan, cos, sin, and a bunch of linear algebra, how to plot and pick lines.. and on top of that, all the nasty code those engines and languages require... The people who make the awesome games you play, aren't just smart, some of them are rocket scientists, literally. The people who put Quake on the market, also launched Spaceship One...
Now if you're a wiz at math, this wont hinder you, but 16 years later, and I'll still crash any major project in a difficult language....
Enter MMF2/Construct 2. These two engines are awesome for people like me. Just plot events, and make some cool stuff, and the math and programming knowledge I learned along the way helps a lot...
If you only want to make a game, then check those out. I am NOT knocking your programming though. If you're smart and love it, go for it... but let me tell ya, if you can't make a strong, well built class in c++, you're nowhere near ready for a 2D game. Just keep learning though, that's what I do, cuz really, writing code is fun 
Still I would check out one of the mentioned if you are like me and not adept to heavy mathematics, my fav in construct... You mentioned not knowing where to start with coding though. Don't get too caught up in the battle. Just know what platforms you want to target and pick the language/framework/engine that's at-least in the top 3. There are literally 100's to thousands of frameworks out there... basically a hammer is a hammer. They all pound nails. Just pick the one you feel best suits you.. The one with the prettiest code to you, and give it a go.
Before rushing off and putting together a C++ 2D game, make a text-based game first. You'll thank us for it in the long run.
On the other hand, that doesnt stop you from making a 2D game whilst you do that. On the side, you could use Unity - or my personal favourite - GameMaker. GM is actually fun to use and very capable. I'd recommend checking out AM2R to see what one can achieve with the program.
