One thing I would strongly recommend against is going to a private game-development school. These tend to market very aggressively and be very expensive. The ed

One thing I would strongly recommend against is going to a private game-development school. These tend to market very aggressively and be very expensive. The education provided is hit-or-miss, largely dependent on the specific high-turnover instructors you get. In my province, you can pay > $25k for an 18 month program. At the end of that program, only the top handful of programming students will actually know how to code vs. copying and pasting. If there's any way you can get into a college or university CS or engineering program, do that instead. Four years may seem like a long time, but if you include the time spent looking for a job after your 18 month program, it could easily be 4 years before you get your first reasonably paying game gig. Also, you can do a four-year engineering degree for about 8-10k a year in Ontario. Co-op can help defray those costs further and make you more attractive for that first full-time job. Universities all have game-development clubs. Also, these are the people you're competing with for that first job. I would much rather hire a CS grad from University of Toronto, or University of Waterloo than someone who barely knows C# from a game school. The flip-side is that there are exceptions. It's possible to find those diamonds-in-the-rough who weren't able or willing to go to university.