You guys are all horrible people, burnt out from your shattered dreams. Except the helpful ones.
Dasleah's thread is good.
The BYOND idea is decent too. As Derek Yu says, don't make tech that you don't have to. Making a game from a programming language is a lot of work from scratch, and if you don't have experience, you'll just quit and be as grumpy as everyone else here.
I don't see what everyone here's obsession with roguelikes are. To me, someone who says "I want to make an ASCII game" sounds like an artist saying "I want to make a stick figure animation". DF's meant to be in 3D, it's only in ASCII because it's the bare blocks Toady wants to work with. You can make a life simulation game just fine without it being a roguelike.
If you're willing to work out of the roguelike mold, try a game making tool like Game Maker, Multimedia Fusion, Construct. All of them have different approaches; I'd recommend Construct for detailed games out of the three as it's designed to scale to more complex applications. Though MMF mixes well with Lua scripting.
You don't want to start with an epic game, though. Pick a direction, map out how you're going to get there, and learn everything you need to. You'll need a lot of experience in the genre before you could make something epic. Either make smaller games, or design a game and have people play it in the Forum Games forum. Get some experience programming a simpler version of the genre. Learn to crawl before you could climb mountains.
TIGSource is where you want to go to learn to make games. Very helpful people.