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.