I've recently hit a brick wall. My game has a strong fan community, and 5 released builds behind it with 10,000 lines of code under the hood. Now I'm not a programmer, I'm a designer and I know we get a bad rep but I'm apparently pretty good at it according to all the candidates I've been showing the GDD work to.

My developer partner recently passed away after a year of development, and so I've had to try and fill the void - at first, I just tried rev-share ads but it was always a wishful outcome to find that kind of passion and willingness to come on board. Once I'd given that enough time I recently turned to freelancers, with pay per milestones, and the money wasn't an issue - I was able to meet all quoted prices. I've interviewed some great candidates and even though I've been willing to factor in them getting to know the code into their pricing, they've all been unwilling to work on the project once they found out how much code had already been implemented.

Thus I find myself in a very strange and confusing position, not knowing how to proceed next. If anyone's got some useful advice beyond my learning to code (I started about a month ago and I've got a lifetime of work to go before I'm at any meaningful level of capability), I'd be grateful to hear it.

@Tom Sloper The code is clean and well commented, and the new features to-be-implemented are documented to a high-fidelity of detail. I've been told all this by 4 freelancers so far who were interested and who looked everything over. It was the scope of the code already existing that ultimately caused them to drop out, as I asked each time.

@Tom Sloper Is that not a lot? I've never advertised for freelancers before, I thought it was a lot. I hope you're right - thank you for the encouragement.

Wolf Beaumont said:

... they've all been unwilling to work on the project once they found out how much code had already been implemented.

10000 lines isn't much, if it's organised well, like I also think you're saying.

It would be very interesting to find out why your candidates dislike that a lot has already been implemented - that's the case for a lot of projects. A lot of projects that also get external people in to work on.

Perhaps it would be useful to get a more specific reason our of the next candidate (if you're unfortunate enough that they also pass on the opportunity)

Wolf Beaumont said:
with pay per milestones

Even if I can understand the approach behind these, paying per milestone won't be an option for me, especially if there isn't an active programmer already working on the game. You need to understand that getting into the code regardless how well it is documented and spoiler, mostly it isn't or it is over documented without saying anything important, you're spending time to get into it and this is a factor that decreases your income on the first few milestones. If there isn't someone one could talk to, this makes the situation even worse for a freelancer