Nowadays it's very rare to find couses that teach GUI programming in C++. Most of the time the teachers in Universities also don't have experience with it. I had to teach myself C++ graphics and Win32 programming by myself many years ago.

Nowadays it's slightly easier to do graphics in C++ thanks to GUI libraries like SDL, wxWidgets and Qt. These libraries have OpenGL bindings so it's possible to do 3D graphics too.

Wah, all talk into making games. What about selling them? Selling is more important than making them.

If doing games, I suggest going into small apps with short development like facebook aps. Selling games especially PC games = suicide cause sure pirate like mad. Promoting outside like awareness campaign oversea is really expensive. Malaysia is like Free to Play model. In Japan, this so call (doujin) amateur game makers actually makes money because piracy in Japan is a taboo. "Recettear" sold over 100k copies because of "Japan" brand. No point spending time,effort and especially money into something that would go down the drain. If sell in Malaysia price would be around RM 10 - RM 25 would be reasonable.

I suggest being amateur is better, you keep your job. At night or weekeend spend sometime doing it with a group. Almost capital free btw.