I am in kind of same boat as you are. My (good paying) company in February turned to be zombie corpo (those that do not make profit really, well we made profit but every time we started our board and CEO just spend it on new “ideas”, and then got even more investors money).
So because of that bankrupcy that kicked me out of my comfort zone i decided to go for game dev. I know it pays less.
Things that i do currently:
I am making some small game, that will either sell or be nice addition to portfolio. Also building portfolio projects, writing down ideas for nice to have modules. And recently got idea for a game that has chances on kicstarter or parteon.
So in short:
build portfolio, have idea for game that can generate passive income, think what modules you need for this game, create those as separate portfolio projects.
And specialize (if you want job in serious/big game company).
Learning backend (ie AWS Python etc.) can get you that job in game industry, they have plenty of game coders, and none for backend, servers etc. However crappy salary still applies, so better to do same job for a bank.