Another Way to Find Teammates?

Now don't get me wrong, I think that the Project Recruitment forum is a great way to find teammates for your project. The problem is it's honestly very inactive. I posted a trade on September 7 and that post, as well as the posts after mine, didn't get any replies. Because I'm looking for someone to work on the graphics while I'm working on everything else, the project has gone nowhere, because I don't have any graphics to use and playtest the game.

So basically, is there another place where I can find people looking for projects? Again, no offense to the forum or anything.

I'd start by working on the 'everything else' with rtp/placeholder graphics. Give people something to see, do they like the mechanics you've developed? Does the story pull them in? If you don't have friends already that want to help you then you need to show prospective teammates what you have to offer first. Even in cases where you actually have a decent amount of work to show, games fail often. I was working on a team where the head producer/artist just up and disappeared one day, and hasn't been heard from for almost a year since just out of nowhere.

If this happens to projects that have 100's or even 1000's of hours of work put in already, how can you blame people for being leery of joining up with someone whose 'project has gone nowhere...' because it doesn't have an artist working for free/trade (and what trade, exactly?) If all else fails you can also put your money where your mouth is. Good art is hard work (I know this because I've devoted hundreds of hours of my own life to learning it in recent months and can still barely draw a stick figure :)) and artists need to eat too and don't always (or likely even often) have the luxury of doing large scale pro bono work unless they are working with a close friend or something even if they do really like the game mechanics/story/other aspects of the game in question.

You could try looking around at other threads in that section, see if someone is looking for a teammate to do what you'd be doing. But no, there's nowhere else on this site that's better for finding teammates. There are things that you can do that might attract people to you, like being a positive member of the community, but in the end they're still going to go to your recruitment page and make the choice to join or not there.

There are two main problems. One, everyone always ends up working on their own game and not wanting to work on someone else's, so no matter where you look you're going to have a hard time recruiting. Two, being an artist is a skilled job, and they're rare. You're competing with a lot of other projects both free and paid to try and get one.

I just took a look at your recruitment page. The chances of finding an artist who can do the style you want and is consistent enough to do an entire game's worth of artwork are very, very low, especially since you've got nothing in your recruitment that makes it an attractive offer. You can up your chances a bit by making the game you're making sound like something the artist wants to be a part of. Sell your game to them, maybe show off another game you made to prove that you can do what you say you can. Still, I don't think you're going to get an entire game of art just for the asking, that is a lot of work and could easily be more work than what you're going to put in, even if you do everything else.