Hey guys,

So I live in the UK and I have just finished my A Levels. Unfortunately due to being severely injured near the end of the first year and having problems for about a year with that, I missed most of school for the second year of A Level. I was doing maths, computer science and business.

Because of missing so much college, I completely failed maths as I didn't know a lot of techniques and I only managed to scrape a pass in business because it isn't too hard of a subject. In computer science however I got an A because I just know a lot about computers and programming comes easy to me.

I have always wanted to become a programmer in the games industry but I will never be able to do a computer science degree with only 2 A Levels especially with one of them just scraping a pass.

So is there things I can do to still be able to get a job as a programmer in the games industry?

Yup, you can write to games companies and beg to work there (ok maybe not literally beg). There are some companies that will take you on in training terms if you can prove you have solid grounding and skills in c++, an alternative would be to get a job working as a developer for business applications etc and then after several years of work make the transition into games.

I mean I left my degree course due to some pretty heavy personal reasons but without a degree I got a job.. did have some uni training though so I could demonstrate a very solid grounding / understanding of programming.

As others said, companies now prefer to take one guy who can show things than a guy who can show nothing and has lot of educations.
Education doesn't mean someone is great, the most of the time it simply means you have education but no experience on real coding.
So I recommend really to work hardly on things and learn from all you can, coding must be before all a pleasure.
If you really want to switch to professional side you must be aware of the pressure in work too.
Pressure means : you have most of the time deadline in the work.

Do your A-levels as evening or summer classes. Getting into games without a degree is hard. Getting in without decent A-Levels is harder. As someone who also had an A in Computer Science at A Level I can tell you that there is sh*tloads you would get to learn at university that is useful for game development and which you're missing out on.