Not everyone wants to write games - or not the same kind of games as the next person.
I can only speak for myself, but programming is my daytime job, so when I program something in my spare time I prefer to work on exactly *what* I want, *when* I want. Doing a big organized team effort in my spare time would probably feel too controlled for me.
If the people here made a game, it would be something like the Zyrinx titles. Nice coding, interesting concepts, awesome as a technical demo, but playability is relative to zero.
It's very hard to just "pool" talents and skills together for a common purpose. The best thing to do is to help people out when they ask about something. Sharing knowledge helps alot. But it will still in the end be up to the project leader to get a game complete. Most projects you see on the internet that succeed are developed by one or two people. Big team efforts usually get no where or fall apart before completing. It's just the nature of non-profit hobby type work when things get really big and rely on many people doing their parts.
Hundred of talented programmers can't replace single talented artist. Making pretty sweet games is mostly all about making design, graphics, music, levels, etc. Code is relatively small part of whole game, and even if it very complex, it is also very difficult to share the work between many programmers. If you'll check staffs of some good 16-bit games, you find that only very few people of whole staff are programmers, and often every programmer works on separate subsystem of the game.
I'm already in the middle of making few MD games, and only thing I will need help with at some point is graphics and music, and possibly sound effects and maybe stages.... but its too early to tell more.
I agree with MottZilla and MottZilla. Huge, that it soo true
Many of us can pulls tricks out of our ass for all kinds of effects, but try to get us to design something on the level of professional top tier games, and it's not going to happen. Gameplay and overall design is really hard to work out. It may not seem like it, but play any homebrew title and you'll know exactly what I mean. It's tough. Been spending A LOT of my time doing lots of research on gameplay mechanics and such. What makes a good game, good. There are lots of little things that are easy to miss, but accumulated - make up a large important part of the gaming experience.
As other said making a game is something more than be a good programmer. In any case, what we need most are graphic and audio artists, but who can work with what the Genny can do: FM sound and tiny graphics.
Don't expect that someone suddenly will give you complete concept of your game from scratch. Start by youself, and when you'll have at least something, it could be discussed here.
The way work should be done is: concept (not just an idea, but detailed description of the game), art, programming.
Alex, what about a level designer who do all this work?
No seriously, in every aspect of this life, if you want to lead a project you have to put yourself first; with that work as a proof, convince other people.