Many of the people who were large contributers have either become inactive or have stopped contributing. The biggest obstacle to the project is artwork.
Oops : (
Sorry about that, by the way. Some life stuff came up and I fell off the bandwagon pretty much right when there was the slightest sense of finality (we finished the plot). Some life stuff has calmed down a bunch recently and I stumbled across discretionary time (gasp), so I'm gonna try to help out again a bit.
One thing that I've always been perplexed due to its absence is actual discussion about making Zelda fan games. I mean, we've got individual games like Martijn's, and that's discussed in his topic, but we don't see many topics coming up about how to actually design games. I remember several months ago there was one topic about dungeon design, and although it didn't last long, I was pretty excited about that.
I think having real, live, useful discussion about how to do the thing this site is dedicated to might be nice. There is very little information (that I've found) online about topics like how to design maps or overworlds, how to put the right number of enemies on a screen, how to increase the difficulty of a game as it progresses, the advantages of gameboy-style screen division vs. bigger alttp or minish cap areas, etc.. There's a lot of discussion that could be useful and relevant to people on this site that for some reason, doesn't happen.
I feel like somebody should start a few topics where active discussion of designing zelda games can actually take place. I know Martijn must know something I don't to put together such a difficult and coherent dungeon like he has in Horn of Balance. We could have topics or a forum to facilitate this type of discussion and sharing of ideas/knowledge.
Oh, and I also second the "competition" sentiment. Every few months I sift through the "screenshot of the week" forum at Zelda Classic's website. I've always failed miserably at even getting that program installed on my computer, and even then I lost motivation to figure out how to use it because it seemed super limiting, but their forums are really active, to the point were a sizable contingent of developers can put together a screenshot of a game every week. I think having a pretty basic, accessible interface for them to design games within might be helping them, while we're more of a "you're on your own, build your own engine" group. So our games are probably more versatile with more powerful engines, but we loose quantity for quality.
So perhaps a monthly or biweekly (every two weeks. Every week seems preposterously ambitious for a community as slow as ours) competition of some sort could be beneficial for our site. We could steal the idea of screenshots, because those can be easily mocked-up by anyone, even if they aren't developing a game. Or we could do maps, like this month, put together a kakariko village, next month, put together a lake hylia, etc..
Oh, you posted at the same time as me gm or whoever you are these days :p
you are shooting yourself in the foot by sticking to a niche market
We do have a non-zelda projects forum, does it get any particularly more activity? I'm not against other games and that could be cool to encourage, but I will point this out: the Zelda Classic site I mentioned, pure zc I think it's called, is even more of a niche than us. Not only is it pretty much just zelda games, but it's just zelda games built in a specific program that modifies the engine of a specific zelda game (Zelda 1). And they seem to be comparatively brimming with activity.