Hiya. I'm assuming that when you talk about game development, you mean developing games without a significant team that you'd have to really manage. You'll be more likely to get a game developed if you can get yourself a team and coordinate it properly. Recommended watching:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQvWMdWhFCc
1. It's a good place to start for developing half of a game. What I mean by this is that a game both a piece of visual/auditory art (hopefully) and a piece of complex code. Learning C++ will get you one half, but not the other, and you cannot have a game with one but not the other.
2. Learn C++ until you can create some basic prototype games with really crappy art, then find someone who can help you with the artsy half.
3. That depends on what libraries you're talking about.
4. 2D MMOs use Flash, typically, not C++.
5. That's an impossible question. We don't know how fast you learn or how determined you will be in the future. In general, though... expect that it will take a very long time. A basic knowledge will not be enough.
6. That depends on the types of games and how willing you are to stay determined even when things get hard. C++ is one of the harder languages to learn.
7. If you want to make an online browser game, the path you'll take to make it will vary greatly from if you wanted to make a 3D game that runs on a console. For example.
8. The way cheat engine works is that it lets the user see the variables that the game has stored in memory, but not necessarily what each variable is. Basically, one just needs to be clever with what one stores in memory, and/or maintain checksums to ensure that the data remains sane/unchanged. If you're working on a game that mostly communicates with a server (like an MMO) or a singleplayer game with no online achievements/statistics/hiscores/rankings, you generally don't need to worry as much about the cheat engine as in the former case most of the gameplay is run where the cheat engine will have limited access, and in the latter if anyone cheats then it hurts nobody but them.
Sorry if I was a bit blunt.
-Albatross