Speaking as someone who actually DID put together an unpaid team to build a long-term project (2 years), I can say in my case, it required several months of prototyping work to set a firm foundation of the game for everyone else to go off of before I started looking for a team to help develop the game. Most people take the opposite approach and try building a team before there's a firmly established look and concept. At least on the internet, this does not work.

But once I had those prototypes and prealphas, all I had to do was locate interested individuals with free time on their hands. This was not hard to do.

Once I started bringing on more team members I was required to write a fairly extensive design document that covered as many mechanics in detail as possible, and the team did rely on this to some extent to figure out where the game was going and what needed to be done to get there. Still, the usefulness of this document lessened as the months passed and everyone on the team got a feel for what the game was about.

The other thing is: we kept in contact all the time. As a team, we never met in person, but the fact that we all regularly used skype was invaluable in keeping the team in touch.

What some people don't realize is that being the leader of a team, particularly one that is underpaid or undermotivated, you HAVE to be the one who performs the brunt of the work on the project. People are motivated when they see things getting done, and this is where Barony's design was key: aside from the music, I had made the game such that, if necessary, I could build it entirely by myself. And when team members were sick or lacked drive or were too busy to contribute, I picked up the mantle and did the work myself.

That's not to understate the contributions of my team members, because they all contributed greatly to the project in various ways (my programmer ended up putting probably 20,000 lines to the finished codebase, my composer wrote nearly two hours of music, my modeler created a dozen different voxel creatures... this is hard work)

BUT, all that being said, I'm still responsible for probably a good 50% of the finished product. Other than music, I touched everything, from models to sounds to textures to code and so forth.

Barony got a lot of help from others but it is very much my game.

So in the end, the strength of a project and the strength of a team really boils down to the capabilities of the one who's leading it. If you're having leadership problems, the likely cause is that the person who is meant to be in charge isn't doing their job and isn't working hard enough. I really can't stress that enough.

Of course that means you have to be well-balanced as an individual to do all these things... and I am not claiming in the least to be perfectly well-balanced. For example, I don't have a lot of skill artistically, which is why I chose to go with a low-res voxelly style for my game, only now my game gets a bad rap for looking like Minecraft. During the last 10% of development we put an easter egg in the game lampooning this criticism, but that is absolutely our biggest weakness and it is something I'm going to work very hard to not repeat in my next game.

The bottom line is: leading a team requires you to be honest, to take responsibility, to work harder than anyone else, to have a clear vision, and to have no question that you're going to finish the game. If you don't have those things you're better off just working on little projects by yourself, or joining a team that has good leadership and doing the little work that falls to you. That's about all there is to it...