Yeah. Wow. Just saying, but describing this as a "company forum" just underlines what I was saying, except that it's sounding even less like a well-meaning homage and more like a cynical attempt at a cash-grab. It implies both a total ignorance of the community and a lack of awareness of what DF actually is other than "that one weird dwarf game".
My honest advice is to work on something which is (as mainiac said) achievable, and one which you and your team are personally interested in, rather than one which you think has an existing untapped audience. If I had to name two reasons why DF clones fail, it would be the lack of understanding of the sheer breadth and depth of DF, and a lack of understanding of what people like about it. The most common thread by far in such games is the desire to create a "simplified" version, but time and again those games have failed to capture a meaningful portion of the DF audience--admittedly in part because of a revulsion for lazy copying of ideas, but also because the devs misunderstood why people enjoy DF.
So again: think on games which you and your associates enjoy. Consider why you enjoy them. Develop more concrete ideas for games in the same spirit, then look around to see if the sort of game you're thinking of is already common. If it is, ask whether there's enough room in the market for another one (and if you can do the idea justice); if it isn't, question why it isn't. Is there not really an audience there? Does the original game in the genre or subgenre (as with DF) possess some ineffable qualities which are not easily replicated?
That's the long and short of it. DF has succeeded because Tarn and Zach have made it a labor of love, because it does something that no other game really matches, because of the incredible complexity of it, because of the organic storytelling potential it provides, and because despite longstanding issues and occasionally frustrating experiences it is still genuinely fun. It's not a terrible flaw to not be able to throw together in a couple months what took a driven and rather brilliant person years to assemble, and there are frankly better and more profitable markets to exploit (though DayZ and Minecraft clones aren't among them--the only worthwhile piece to emerge from that mess in a long while is Ark).
tl;dr: Be genuine. Be creative. Take inspiration from games you love, not ideas from games which are popular. If you're a small-time group just about the only thing you can do that'll be worse than being flaky, unproductive, and dismissive is to be cold, distant, and uninvolved. Nobody will care about your game if you don't.