As a sidenote, to anyone who doesn't know the story of how Dwarf Fortress is being made, you should check it out. It's one guy, working full time on it, and managing to support himself and his brother through monthly donations. It's released completely free of charge, so this is just solely from people donating. That alone would be a pretty cool story, but when you look at the immense, mindboggling, ridiculously ambitious scale of the the planned finished game, it's incredible. He's basically trying to build a completely "generic fantasy world simulator", with procedurally generated world, history, etc. The amount of detail he goes into in this is amazing, and he has so much more planned. If you ever need to be inspired that one person can make a living doing what they love, or that you can actually implement features that are ambitious beyond most AAA developers' wildest dreams, look to Toady One.
As a bonus, it's a pretty fun game!