I've been working on my mud as a solo project for years now. Probably the greatest advantage to going it alone is that you get to create exactly the game you want to create (My vision! No touchy!). Probably the greatest disadvantage is that creating exactly the game you want takes forever and then some.

Originally the plan was to put something presentable together and then start looking for other people who would be interested in the project. After about six years, however, I've never quite gotten around to the whole looking for other people bit.

In part this is a result of two previous experiences with collaborative game design. On the first occassion, I managed, by a completely freakish stroke of luck, to meet up with another designer with whom I developed an instant rapport. We had similar schedules, we were able to devote about the same amount of time and effort into the project we were working on, we had a similar background in terms of the muds we were familiar with, and we were equally competent coders. Unfortunately, we also had very divergent visions of the sort of game we each wished to create. We managed to negotiate our way through several very productive months of development, but after RL concerns forced a hiatus in the project we were never able to muster the enthusiasm to get things up and running again and I drifted back to my solo project.

More recently I actually responded to a forum posting for someone looking for a coder to work with. At the start this looked like it might be a good fit. The person in question had already fleshed out a lot of ideas and concepts for a game world, but needed a codebase with which to implement these ideas. I had just recently started working with the Genesis/ColdC driver, and had all the basic elements of a game in place, but had not yet started introducing the thematic elements or the trappings of the game world. However, this person had also hired several other coders, none of whom seemed to have any coding experience, and which included one individual who was quite obviously not a team player and who seemed interested only in putting down other people's ideas while not actually offering any ideas of his own. It took me about half-an-hour to decide it was time to quietly take my ball and go home.

I suppose there is always a need to be willing to compromise individual vision when trying to put together any group project. The trick is finding a group of people that don't require unacceptable compromises and sacrifices of vision.