Hey, my first post here, and hopefully not the last
So I'm 17, and will need to move out of parents house soon, and will need a serious job in few years. I'm currently studying medicine, however I do not see myself working passionately in the industry. The decision to get into those studies were probably out of pure need to make my father proud, or make my life great later on. However, I realized that game development is where I belong.

I'm at the point 0 right now. Never even touched any programming languages (would of started learning at a young age if I wasn't more concerned about catching all the pokemon..). No skills around that subject whatsoever. Not even a lot of knowledge about it.
However, I'm the type of person who can study a new thing for years, 16 hours a day, without taking my eyes off of it. So I learn very fast.
So to get started, I need someone experienced in the industry to answer me some questions if that's not a problem, and add something if you feel like I missed out.

1) I want to start off working at a game dev. company like Activision, riot, or w/e (when I feel like I'm prepared of course). Most probably as a programmer. How does a company come together into making a game? I understand that there are different roles everyone takes. Artist, creative writer, programmer, music producer etc. However, I also realize that different people prefer different programs. Some artist may prefer Mudbox over Rhino, or some other modeling program. Some programmer may know C++, but not some other programming language, or vice versa. So do all those different art programs for instance give the same end result that can be implemented within any game programming? Does any programming language suitable for gaming can be made to cooperate with another programming language? (so 2 programmers with knowledge of 2 different languages can work together). Or do certain projects use only certain programming language? And certain art tools?


2) How do game engines work? What do they do?

3) What's opengl for instance?

4) In game files, you see .dll, .cfg, etc. But you rarely see any in game art work as view-able picture within game files. How are those artworks stored in those different format files? Are they converted to some sort of code?

5) If answer to 1) is "Every project can only use 1 type of programming language", what languages are best used then? I'd guess c++?

6) What languages are best learned for game programming in general?

7) Why are there so many different languages? How is one language superior to another?



So that's pretty much all. I know the questions are very very lame and noobish, and probably contains many misunderstandings, so I apologize for that

Thanks for all your help.