Note: While I'll be mentioning UT/ DR a lot, this can be applied to any project in general. LONG read. Also, I'm not a professional at all so take my words with a grain of salt.

I often get asked whether I wanna join a new fangame project or not. I get intrigued and ask them to explain their project. They do, but as soon as they do, they scramble to find anything interesting they can show to me that'll make me wanna join their team. At that point, I'll usually decline and tell them to wait until they have more substantial progress.

Or, I'll come across a multitude of help wanted posts from projects that just got their pages up and starting fresh. No screenshots, concept art, music, nothing, immediately asking for help. I usually look away from those.

Well, what's the problem?:

These projects are usually started from people with little-to-no game development experience, their first game project being something as complex as an Undertale fangame(if you're not making a single fight, that is), and are asking for people's help on a game that JUST came into existence. They have nothing to show for themselves. They just expect you to be interested purely based on the concept and maybe the roles they show off. Ehh, idk about you, but that's not how you get a person's interest.

What can we do about this?:

First impressions, retaining attention, and marketing is very important for any game dev. We live in the days of short attention spans, TikTok(unfortunately), and games that are constantly being pumped out. People come and go everyday. It just so happens that you wanna make a game yourself, but don't have the team to do so. What do you do? Hire people, of course!... But you don't know how to do that either. Well that's okay! In the meantime, you can just sit and plan out your game for now. You will do that, right..?

Well anyways, as a game dev, it's important to know that people aren't just gonna join any Undertale or Deltarune fangame project, especially in today's age where fangames are constantly dying left and right. How do you combat this? Learn the skills yourself, firstly.

Before you even start any sort of game development, it's important to make sure you even have the skills to, well, develop games. Take the time to develop your skills some more. What do you wanna learn to do? Art? Music? Coding? There's classes for all that nowadays! Take a look at pixel art resources. I'd recommend saint11. Wanna learn how to code? GameMaker is an amazing engine that allows anyone to just get a game running with little code as possible. All you need is an object, a room, and a few lines of code to make something that resembles a game. Don't take my word tho, here's an official tutorial.

Learning is hard, yes, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. You can only get as far as your motivation lets you. No one's gonna listen to an Idea Guy talk about how ambitious this new game's gonna be and how they need your help to make it fully realized. "New Deltarune fangame featuring 7+ chapters, NEW bosses, SECRET BOSSES, more! Looking for programmers, pixel artists, writers..." blah blah blah. You're not gonna hire anyone being that way. You need to have some weight into what you're saying. You need to let people know that you mean business. How can you do that? Once you've learnt the necessary skills to become a game dev, where next?

Game progress:

Great! So now you're ready to start making a game and hiring people! Except no you're not. You still don't know how to hire. Well, how? How can we grab people's attention? You need to ask yourself: "Why am I wanting to immediately hire people for a game that doesn't even have anything to its name yet?" Answer: Don't reveal your game until you have substantial progress.

Take this time to develop the game. Start making some art for it, get an alpha build going so that you can start showing it off to people, start posting some music. The more you have to show to people, the more people will be interested in your project. Once you have enough progress you feel is presentable, start pitching your game idea to potential people! Start showing off the game! Make that help wanted post with all the progress you have so far. It's helpful when you already have a following from working with previous projects or an account you've already built up a following with.

Also, something else you need to keep in mind is that some people aren't gonna come to you, so you need to go to them instead. Where do you look for people for hire? For art, I'd recommend Twitter, Deviantart, Tumblr, just any art website. Look up video game fanart they may've done. Music? Soundcloud or anything else. Once you've found a person of interest, type out a personal response to them. Tell them what your game is about, show game progress, ask why and how they could be useful in helping further game development, send, and just play the waiting game. I had to do all this to get where I'm currently at with True Geno.

And if you really can't be bothered to learn the skills yourself, you could always support your local commissioning artist, composer, programmer, etc.! You may not necessarily have the skills, but they surely do! Just know that it'll get expensive really quickly. You don't have to do everything yourself, but it is important that you have at least some of the skills needed to make a game.

If you can follow all these tips, then you'll be on your way to making successful help wanted posts and hiring people to help work on your new UT/ DR fangame! Just make sure to delete comments from people that comment stuff like "i wish i could help, but...", "i may not be a coder, but...", etc. as those can and will become annoying.

tl;dr: Stop making help wanted posts when you have literally nothing to show besides a vague idea. Instead, develop the game more. Make some art, music, etc. to show to people.