The problematic development of Chickadee

If you haven't been in the know on Chickadee, my Breakout-inspired game, let me get you up to speed. My programmer, Jo, won't be able to work on the game for quite a while, so I essentially had to put development on hold for a currently unknown amount of time. The question that you might be asking yourself is why. That's not that tough of an answer, believe it or not.

Chickadee started as me following a Game Maker tutorial, a Breakout-styled game with octopuses and sea urchins. The only difference was that I added my own visual theme to the game. I then asked my programming friend from Europe who also worked a bit on Super Push Adventure if he'd be interested in helping. He said "yes", to my excitement.

The issue here is that my programmer has basically done all the work with the innards of how Chickadee is built. That includes the physics, how enemies interact with Chickadee, and how progression takes place. Everything was done with my direction. I'd basically go, "Is it possible to make this enemy do this or that?" and my programmer would say yes and implement it.

I have no idea what I'm looking at.
Is this Russian code? It's Russian code, right?

Game Maker Studio has its own programming language that it uses, and like any language, there are multiple, countless, interpretations used. This means that my programmer used his own coding structure and form for implementing what I wanted to happen with the game. This makes it so if a totally different programmer wanted to complete Jo's work, they would have to intensely comb through his code, trying to understand what Jo did and why. This is next to impossible since there are so many interpretations one could make out of Jo's code.

Chickadee is too promising to outright cancel,
so I'm going to rough it and wait for Jo to be free.

Thus, since I'm incredibly ignorant when it comes to coding, much less actually using Game Maker in general, I had no choice but to put the development of Chickadee on a semi-definite hiatus. It's a total disappointment, as I really liked how the game was shaping up, and I put a lot of thought into the characters, their designs, the art, the level concepts, the game structure, and a myriad of other things. To say that the hiatus of Chickadee left me depressed would be quite the understatement. Still, I can work on Legends of Adrigal in the meantime, but at the same token, it greatly soured me in thinking that I have a future in game development.