Basically, I'm sick of working for a living and I want to seriously start thinking about making money out of games...
It no less the work doing game programming than what you do now. Make no mistake about it.
After years of working as a freelance programmer doing more mundane work, I now make enough enough from my regular clientele to have the time and resources to work at launching a game effort. It took years and lots of "go hungry" days to get where I'm am.
My advice, "don't sell the bicycle shop Orville". Stick with your job, build a *paying* clientele on the side so you can later "leave" your job and still pay the bills. Then, work on games.