I'm a programmer and I've been involved in tons of /v/ and /vr/ projects that have crashed and burned. Various experiences:
* I work in Linux with C++ and OpenGL primarily. Team chose Unity as a platform, which didn't have any Linux support at the time. I was the only person who knew how to program, and the other "programmers" had never touched anything except HTML. Lots of art and concepts got done, but almost no programming. I wanted to help out, but contributing code was difficult because I haven't used C# in years and I couldn't test my code. Also, nobody knew how to use source control. It died within two weeks.
* Programming got done, but all the artists dropped out. Game was to be in 3D, and we got a couple unrigged models (and one half-rigged one) but wasn't enough to work with. Our programming-art level models were good enough, but nobody wanted to spend hours on rigging as well as hours on programming for a hobby project. It died within a month.
* Programming got done, sprite work got done, lots of sample levels and level editor got done, but nobody wanted to get around to actually finishing the damn thing except me, and when I wanted to release the source code and level editor to the community FOSS so somebody else could do it, nobody else was willing to let that happen, so it's dead in a dropbox somewhere (none of the other programmers knew how to use version control) because it's proprietary
Those are the more notable ones. Every other project pretty much can be summed up as "everybody started off super stoked, but then everybody got burned out and dropped out, starting with the musicians, then the artists, then the writers, then the project management, then the programmers last". I wish I could do it with just programmers alone, but it takes so much fucking work and time to model, rig, and animate even shitty programmer-art models.
fodasss men, xesq do dele