Meetings are a huge waste of time; a draconian artifact of a bygone era. It pays to write it all in email because you have at hand all that you need to cover your ass.

One of which was that the project was started out of Boredom

I think that's the biggest problem right there. What's the point if nobody is into it? I've had 3 people back out of my project after one or two days. But that's fine in my book. I'd rather wait for someone enthusiastic about it, than have people give a half hearted effort because it's really not their thing. I'll continue to work alone until I find the right folks.

Gnollrunner said:
I'll continue to work alone until I find the right folks

Same here, if you give up just because other people let you hang then you're not spending your heartbeat to it.

GeneralJist said:
Was I too harsh?

I don't know anything about your “company” but in a real busines world, even in my country where people can't get fired that easy without a lawsuit, those people would get 2 strikes and then be kicked out of it without consequences for the owner. So no, they had enougth chances and if they give no effort to do their part, they're not worth to drag them with you all the way.

I honestly see a lot of requests recently, especially in the Discord groups I'm in, that just want to be part of the team to have their names in the finished product with limited or even without any knowledge of the position they request for

GeneralJist said:
I'm still trying to figure out what I did wrong

Maybe you should have spend more expertise in the recruitment process or at least have someone on an expert position who can deal with candidates. This is what I do, I felt to often into people who were hired too early and turned out to be more work to get them convinced than the project profits from. So take your time, make an interview with them and tell them what you expect, what tools you use and maybe also a little test task can help. Doesn't need to be something very complex, 10 Minutes and you'll most of the time see how much effort people bring to your project.

Motivating people can be a realy exhausting task, even in real busines. The key is to have an open ear for your team and offer solutions. Something which doesn't work even in big AAA companies sometimes. This is btw. one of the key tasks of a producer.

Having experts in your team is one of the key goals. Projects don't succeeds without proficient leading in programming, art, level design, game design and so on. Someone must take the head and make decisions. However, decisions have for sure to be communicated and planned with the rest of the team. In my current job, we have product owners, people which are responsible for a single feature area of the game. They have their teams, do planning and their own team meetings. In the project wide communication, they're responsible for keeping the other POs up to date, schedule the workload for their team and manage the feature in order to reach the overal goal

GeneralJist said:
Everyone here are volunteers, but this has never happened to me before

This happened to me more than I liked, from both sides. I can remember of a single indie company which has had several of those issues. People didn't communicate, features were planned and implemented which haven't been communicated, programmer caused code to break because they simply deleted code lines or entire files from the repository and in the end the company owner talked gossip about employees that have left the company while those have left for a reason, missing payments and no willing to give them a contract.

We were developing a medival city building game, I have been lead programmer there and co-game designer because I sold them a game design I made. Everything was ok, we had a publisher for it and were working on a prototype. At some point before the first milestone, the company owner hired a writer and set focus onto telling a story rather than having the core features implemented first. So everyone, game design, level design and programming was told to set focus on supporting the writer to put in “his” story. Long story short, we missed 2 milestones and our publisher canceled the contract. I left the company for not being payed anymore while the rest of the team worked for another year FOR FREE to get something shipped to steam which was miles away from the original game design. And you can guess, he also gossiped about me to maroon the team

Finding employees is easy. Finding reliable employees is hard. Finding volunteers is also hard. Finding reliable volunteers is bordering on impossible. Never, ever assume that the people working with you are going to stick around for the completion of the project, especially if you're not paying them.

@GeneralJist Motivation is definitely key. All of the best codebases out there in open-source land are written by coders who love what they do and look forward to seeing their labor bear fruit, even if they’re not getting paid for it.

You want an artist who is captivated by the thought of seeing his or her art on the screen, animating, in the game. Unfortunatel, finding someone like that is easier said than done. I hand-rolled by own Swiss army knife of 2D engines but struggled to find an artist who had that spark. They’re out there, though.

You don’t need 10 people mate, just 4 or 5 people who have a clear understanding of what is expected of them. If this understanding is reached by all, the need for meetings is nearly eliminated. Whiteboarding is a good way to help people understand the direction they need to be moving in.