There are probably a lot of indie developers across the country that would be more than glad to work with you. And a lot of audio work can be done remotely. Your studio is of a totally different type than theirs and so you are likely to be in another building even if you were in the same city. Plus, a lot of it is just producing digital files. There's almost no reason I can think of why you can't work very remotely.
Especially for game artists, I think it's extremely important to network, as mentioned. Groups like Dallas Society of Play get together just for that purpose of bring game people, often indie game developers, together to network. This includes programmers, designers, and artists. I've been surprised at how talented a lot of the indie developers are who have little more than skills and a dream although some I've come across have industry experience. It might be worth while to make contact with groups like this remotely, but if there is a major population center within a couple hours of you, you might want to start such a group through Meetup or something along those lines. It might be worth your while to travel 2 or 3 hours once a month to participate. And if there's not already such a group in your area, you might form one yourself.
To make it work though, I would imagine you need a pretty large city. I would expect about 10 people to show up per million in the area once the group starts getting established (although that may be a somewhat rotating group of who shows up with a larger group that attends irregularly). Really, that's probably more regional population than actual city population. Charleston might be a possibility, although I'm really thinking more like Atlanta or Charlotte, although that may be too far of a commute.
But you might reach out to groups like Dallas Society of Play and just let them know you are out there and seek some advice from the organizers of such groups. I know they specifically have some pretty talented indie developers and some of them may be looking for musicians and sound designers. There's one team specifically that I know of that has been expanding. I think they're all getting paid although I don't know how much or exactly what their situation is (they may be getting paid in Nuka Cola caps). I just know that they seem to have grown to about 5 people now. I imagine they are operating on a shoe string budget because they haven't had any big revenue generators yet, but I've seen some of their work and it's very impressive. Not sure where their team is as far as sound at this point.
I've been working on things outside of the sound and music with games. I'm actually a musician, but not one with as impressive of a resume as yourself. But I've been doing game programming for several years now and now I'm more focused on learning 3D modeling (getting away from coding for awhile). I have a vague idea of how to marry it all up together. The hardest part is learning to compose. I think the programmers on whatever project would help you with the parts you don't understand or do it for you. If you can produce WAV files, or maybe MP3s, that's like 99% of what they need. They are probably going to be able to figure out how to get the audio files worked into their project.
I do fairly low level programming, rather than using game engines, although I've used Unity and expect to try Unreal pretty soon. Most of the audio I've done so far, in programming, has been fairly simple play back of MP3 files usually for folly. I know some of the game people I've come across are using audio libraries that do more complex mixing of the sound. I imagine you already know how to work with DAW software, soft synths, VST pluggins, and such. I've heard of indie developers using software for things such as how one piece of music blends with another when the player is suddenly attacked, for example. A lot of the audio has to be tied to events in the game. So, at some point you might be asked to learn a new piece of software, but I imagine the learning curve would be pretty easy for you. Learning how to make the music and sound effects is the hard part. Seems to me that getting them into the game is not nearly so hard. And I would imagine you would get a lot of help with that from the programmers. I think they generally know how to do such things; they just don't know how to produce the WAV files and MP3s, or more importantly compose or play an instrument.
I think for most games it's more like movie and television scoring than pop rock. I've played in bands, but tv and movie scoring is a bit different composition wise. Then there's also folly and sound design for effects. I find that to be some of the hardest stuff to come by as a game programmer. I bought a $500 digital audio recorder so that I could go on location and record actual sounds. Games are very lifeless without sound effects. There's no way you could release a commercial game without them. And for non-arcade type games where you need more realistic sounds, it can be difficult to find the sounds you are looking for. If there's a motorcycle in your game, where do you get all the sounds associated with the engine starting, stopping, changing gears, etc? There's some places on line to download sound effects, but it's kind of hit and miss as to whether they will have exactly what you are looking for. I guess my point is that there's a big need for audio effects and often specific custom audio effects.
Something else you might consider, that just came to my mind, is selling some assets in the Unity store. Game engines like Unity often have asset stores where they sell art assets. That may be a way to get some remote work and make a little money. Not to mention, that if you've sold a bit, it gives you something to put on the resume. I would guess that you're better than many who sell there although I haven't actually gone through the audio assets there.
I've been too busy learning the programming and visual art to even think seriously about the audio side. I guess I figure with my background I'll figure it out when I get there. I usually find my weakest area and focus on it for awhile to make it stronger. Audio started out as my strongest, but it's starting to lag behind enough to become my weakest. Still, I've got a million things to learn before I see myself getting around to do audio. But I'm a bit unusual in that I try to do it all. I think most indie developers you come across will be a lot more specialized and greatly appreciate someone who's qualified to produce audio.
