GAMER LOUNGE 20XX (NO CASUALS!!)

[Kitsu]

So I've always wanted to make a fangame but I'm only capable of making sprites. How can I get people interested in helping me make something like that? I would need programmers, artists, music writers, and so much more. No easy feat. I don't know if it's possible to get a team on board. TSR itself has attempted it many times and it often never goes anywhere.

Alas, I have a burning passion to do so anyway!

I'd suggest writing out professional game development documents, such as detailed game design documents and proposals. These would showcase how serious you are in developing your game and hopefully demonstrate that you're not just the "idea guy." Making some accompanying art (and related art documents such as asset lists and art style guides) would also help there, too.
You'd still need to address the issue with motivation; it's especially hard to motivate people to spend time on a project if they're not also very passionate about it, and real life issues can easily become blockers. Of course, if you have it, monetary compensation can help in both areas, but if that's not possible, you can try to plan out as much as possible and work with what you have when you have it (such as relying on a couple core team members while accepting assistance from a revolving door of people with free time or something).

One of the fan projects I've worked on has two core members (one writer/designer and one programmer/animator) and they would assess exactly what assets they would need and get volunteers to help out (on my part, the animator would work out a stick figure animation and then I would flesh it out based on a single finished frame). Lately, I'm guessing because volunteers were not reliable, they started commissioning someone to churn out portrait sprites, too.

I'd also suggest considering using an "Agile Methodology" to keep relatively steady progress and to ensure that for every time period involved, you could have a "playable" (not necessarily as playable as you'd like, but just enough) thing to demonstrate what you'd worked on.

I guess though most of these things are how you can keep an ongoing project alive, but I'm not entirely sure how to get your starting crew to begin development other than to work on a good proposal and just pitch anywhere you think could work out (consider creating the proposal and designs to be project work just as much as making the actual game really).