>>3826755
Released my first game earlier this year. You remind me of me when I was first starting out on it, so I'm gonna give a couple pointers. Take everything I say with a grain of salt, I'm just one guy.
First of all, it's good that you seem to be making a conscious effort not to bite off more than you can chew and getting the help you feel you need, but make sure you can bring something to the table yourself, preferably something that fills a niche of which you'd otherwise have to spend a non-negligible amount of time looking for someone who can do it decently. This excludes character/story writing unless you're incredibly confident you can do it better than 99 percent of the modern industry, which admittedly is not hard.
Second of all, make doubly sure you can pay your helpers consistently, otherwise you're unlikely to retain support unless you're reasonably talented at the aforementioned thing.
Thirdly, you are putting the cart before the horse trying to cultivate a community before you have so much as a tangible playable prototype. Every aspiring young creator believes, whether consciously or not, that his or her idea is inherently interesting enough to warrant discussion. Unless you already have an established fanbase, that is not going to happen. You need to have, at bare minimum, something tangible to show people. Ideally you want to have a trailer which looks good enough that it could fool a naive onlooker into thinking the game might be nearly done. This isn't as hard as it sounds, but that doesn't mean it's easy.
Fourth, deadlines are a balancing act. Calculate how long you think your game is going to take to finish. Now multiply that amount of time by two. Chances are it's gonna take even longer. With this in mind, setting an internal deadline is a good motivator to get shit done. Whatever you do, do NOT set a public deadline until you know for damn certain that you can meet it with time to spare. I learned this the hard way.
continuing in next post