I can't think of anything legal that could get you a $40k salary working solo where you didn't already have a high level of skill to begin with. Maybe you could spend the 2 years building your skill in some area that isn't particularly glamorous and therefore full of hobbyists.
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Solo game development as feasible profit-oriented business?
Solo devs without commercial experience can still make hits (and big money) but it's more like playing the lottery than a business plan. If that's your passion, then you can stick with it for several years of hobby time... and if it flops, hey, it's just a hobby.
I'd recommend staying with salaried jobs until you gain more experience, to the point where people would be willing to hire you as a freelancer based on your CV, or you honestly look around your workplace and can say "I can do this better by myself".
I know some inexperienced indie gamedevs locally who probably make around $40k as freelancers, but that requires a lot of networking / embedding yourself into an indie "scene" IRL so that people are aware of your service (like any business: marketing is essential to create a market for your product), and requires a great dash of luck.
You could make some kind of niche gamedev tool, and sell it or do a crowdfunding campaign to finish it. e.g. Sprite lamp comes to mind, which raised over $20k USD in funding... Throw in after-crowdfunding sales and a bit of freelancing and the author might've been able to claw himself up to $40k USD/year...
That path would probably require a shitload of prototyping of loads of ideas, in a quest for something truly innovative and exciting... which you should probably do while salaried, and then make the decision to start a business once you've struck gold.
As many others have pointed out: If you are solely profit oriented, avoid the game dev business like the plague.
Not because you cannot make a ton of money in it... many studios are HIGHLY successfull! But these most of the time are bigger shops and have been in the business for decades before becoming highly successfull.
Not because you couldn't become BILLIONAIRE (see Notch, altough he technically wasn't a lone Indie) as a single individual. But then even the ones much less successfull needed a streak of luck to achieve the success they had similar to winning the lottery.
The big question is: Why? Why would you do this to you, try to force your luck in the game dev business if really all you are interested in is improving your salary? When you can easely climb the ladder in the corporate IT world and make double what you make today with a decent senior job in the right company, even before you go up the management ladder.
Is this a fun career? Well, depends on what you call "fun"... then again, developing games for a living is also not just "fun and games", and really, at some point MOST people have to decide wheter they want to maximize profit or the "fun factor" in their professional career... not many people achieve making millions by surfing at hawaiian beaches for a living, and the ones that do only do so with hard work AND a ton of luck. Unless want to bet on your luck, your hard work is better spent in a less high risk / low reward environment.
Only try to get into game development professionally if you REALLY think you will enjoy working on games way more than working on business software or filling out financial spreadsheets, to the point you would accept a paycut and worse working conditions just for that.
And lets not forget, building up your own company often takes 5+ years just to start making a profit, and is by far not the quickest way to start rake in more cash.
My 2cents as someone not working in games, but as a longtime hobby dev with a interest in everything about game development
As many said, creating games on your own just to make profit is quite hard and risky, especially since there are quite a few large companies focused on just that.
An alternative solution could be to create prototypes of games, and try to sell them to the aforementionned companies. But for it to work, you'd need to prove to the company that your concept can work. If it's an existing concept, then they probably won't need to buy yours, since it's already out there, and they can just adapt it to their games in a different enough way to ensure they don't get sued.
There is a really interesting talk from Jake Birkett, founder of Grey Alien Games, who makes game almost on his own, and talks about his experience, and how he makes a kind of living out of it: http://greyaliengames.com/blog/the-no-hit-wonder-my-gdc-2016-talk/
If I were you, I would focus more on finding out what is the one thing I dream of doing, and then looking at how to do it and monetize it, and make good profit out of it. It is not going to be an easy path (it's actually quite hard and scary), but from my experience, it's the best way to ensure you are consistently enjoying what you do, and it's then that you become the most efficient when working (since it no longer feels like working).
Maybe it is a profit oriented. But single only development will be use so much time. We wanna be a little comand, but when developments starts we all need more men
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