Since I joined Ive had an interest in the Community Projects. The problem I see with the current project is that no one is making a decision. It is more a lot of discussion in many threads and nothing is done. With a community project you would also like to give newbies a chance to contribute as veterans move on to other stuff. If you have to work through all those threads you would think twice before contributing. I also noticed that everyone jumped at making the contents of the game, before they even know what the concept is. This results in people doing a lot of useless work. Also I've looked anything concerning programming was available, but that isn't the case. So my advice will be the following:
1) Have a captain (and maybe officers) to steer the ship.
2) Have some facility to share resources, like graphics, audio and programming.
3) Have a place that contains all the information about the game and to-do lists the game. The information will also be the GDD of the game. To prevent that every one jumps onto assets and programming, you might want to let the captain and officers make a beginning GDD with the most basic stuff. You also perhaps want to add some technical info about how big tiles are, and how many tiles Link passes when he jumps of the cliff. Or how the state machines (if your using state machines) of Link and the story work. The buttons used.
From the starter concept the community can discuss everything, but once the captains says it is set, no discussion is possible anymore.
4) Site staff back up would be nice.
For a community project you don't need to remake an existing Zelda game, but you could do a homebrew story as well. You could even revive the current one. You do need to set some basics at the start, like how the engine will be build, the graphic style and so on. This has to be found on the information page and best be decided by the captains.
4Sword. It could be me, but from your replies it seems as if you want to constrict every fan game to MC style and only use the stuff that can be ripped from the game. Sometimes it is necessary to create some custom stuff and let the captains decide to use it in the assets list. You also might one day decide to do a community game in 3D or make an new graphics style. But to put everything in a topic on the forum might not be the best idea. Because from my own experience when I have to find something in 20 pages topic, I already lose much motivation, to search through useless replies. Also because you have to read the entire bloody history of how a thing is developed, while you just want the thing.
Those are my thoughts. Niek Hoeijmakers signing off!
PS: what ever happend to the current one (King of Thieves), if it is dead I would like to see if I can brew a decent concept for it, which might bring it back on track again. That is if someone were to give me some of the latest info on the game.