The first question I think you should ask yourself is: why do you want to go into game development? Is it to take part in making a AAA hit? Do you have lots of your own game designs that you'd love to see the light to day? Do you want to work on a 500-person team on a AAA title, or with two other people on your thing? What sort of games do you want to make? Depending on the answer to those questions, the path you'll want to take will be very different.
My personal dream was more on the "I want to make my own things and control everything" side, so after leaving traditional tech, I focused on releasing lots of freeware games, an active Twitter presence, and building up "brand" recognition for myself in preparation for the first commercial title.
I'm now a somewhat successful solo indie dev, and my latest game Slipways [1] pays my bills as I'm getting ready for my second big project. So this approach can work, but it is very... effort heavy. And probably nowhere close to what you want to do if your goals are different from mine.
But: if you really want it and have the programming chops already (and it looks like you do), getting into gamedev is mostly a matter of taking the plunge and seeing where that path takes you.
[1]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1264280/Slipways/
My personal dream was more on the "I want to make my own things and control everything" side, so after leaving traditional tech, I focused on releasing lots of freeware games, an active Twitter presence, and building up "brand" recognition for myself in preparation for the first commercial title.
I'm now a somewhat successful solo indie dev, and my latest game Slipways [1] pays my bills as I'm getting ready for my second big project. So this approach can work, but it is very... effort heavy. And probably nowhere close to what you want to do if your goals are different from mine.
But: if you really want it and have the programming chops already (and it looks like you do), getting into gamedev is mostly a matter of taking the plunge and seeing where that path takes you.
[1]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1264280/Slipways/