As someone who started as a game developer and is now mostly in the web world, I totally agree to start with Unity - a side project I have now is using it, and

As someone who started as a game developer and is now mostly in the web world, I totally agree to start with Unity - a side project I have now is using it, and it's an absolute godsend as a small/one man team for making games. You can do almost anything you can do in a AAA studio engine, but with more productivity and a gentler learning curve. So yeah, to parent poster: Go download Unity and do the tutorials. It's also worth working through some OpenGL tutorials to get a feel for how the lower level stuff works.