I’m in very early stages of a similar project (platform fighter) and a similar issue (I can’t do everything and was having trouble finding reliable people). I don’t know if our project goals are similar enough to warrant working together, but I think it may be worth talking about a possible collaboration. Perhaps even just to make the game multi platform (I’m targeting a retro game console) given that we’ll both need a lot of the same things even if the code itself has a lot of differences. Art, sound, music, story/text, but even things like defining character lists, abilities, and game balance related things is important and duplicative.

By very early stages I mean I don’t have any game logic written yet. I’m targeting retro game console hardware and so far I’ve mostly been writing code (primarily C) to test my understanding of how the hardware functions/limitations (already found some bugs between emulator and real hardware that impacts some home brew games from other developers), and then writing functions that will become a game building library (I don’t know that it’s right to call it an “engine”). Granted, I’m making a lot of assumptions at this point about what I’ll need in terms of features, but also in terms of how much system resources are safe to allocate to different pieces, so when I get things a little more understood and have some core library functions I’m happy with, I’ll start writing game logic to see what more I need / what changes I need to make.

I’ve not worked on it for a few months as I’ve been busy with contract work that I was just informed this week is ending prematurely due to budgetary changes. As such, I expect to have time to pick it up again starting next week.