Hello everyone. Some background information, I have been in the IT industry for a few years, working primarily as a distributed computing programmer. Most of my experience are web or web related and my primary programming language is .NET c# & sql. However I want to retrain myself for game development, but particularly the animation/simulation part of things. Why? I just have a particular fondness and fascination of all things cg animated. Plus I want a career that is a lot more challenging and rewarding. I also work on a few crypto/2d graphic related projects on my own, but those are also done mostly c#, just because the speed of development and abundance of 3rd party resources allows me to rapidly prototype just about anything. Additionally I do a few digital illustration, now and then mostly done in corel painter/photoshop. So far, I have applied to a few jobs but it's hard to make a break without the c++ experience (plus the current economic condition). While I studied c++ during my undergrad years, it's not nearly at the pro level. To make matter worse, 80% of the courses I took, I actually used Java, the rest was shared between c++ and assembly, sql/pl and that seems like a long time ago. Where do I start? Should I take an online degrees (these are serious time and money investment) that don't necessarily pay off, plus some employers are said to laugh at these. Should I just self study? Or where exactly do I start? Help please, and thank you for your advice!