What holds me back are 1. I'm ashamed to reveal the monstrosity 2. I'm afraid the code is too messy for anyone to be able to make contributions 3. it will make it much easier for hackers to find exploits.
It's a shame because I think the game would be really cool as an open source project.
When I find an open sourced game engine that has been patched and improved by the community, ported to OpenBSD, made run smoother on my hardware, etcetra., I don't think "what a shame the code is so messy." I think "I'm so glad they released the source code and allowed this to happen!"
It's very sad to see so many games that I'd potentially like but then I run into little issues that nobody is ever going to fix without the source (or a complete remake, as in the case of e.g. OpenMW, but these projects are not very common and few of them ever mature).
Game developers often think of gamers as very entitled people, but flip side is that gamers are usually left on their own with their problems and they aren't given the tools to fix them while the developer is too big or busy (or both) to care.
What is a "gong" in this case? An actual (in-game) gong? :)
Going through the shame of showing it off is more valuable on its own merits than leaving it as is, regardless of the code quality or social outcomes.
If you are working in a global company with a distributed workforce, well-written code is mandatory because it is a way to communicate and to maintain the code in the long term. Even more so if this is a critical code that could kill.
But if you started as a lone developer for a game hobby project, the achievement is not about the code quality, but more about the product as a whole you managed to ship and have users or customers.
So I don't think there is anything inherently shameful in writing bad code, it highly depends on the context
Of course if you avoid that while still writing a mess, it's mostly fine.
It doesn't require much maintenance and I'm running it on the lowest tier Digital Ocean droplet so almost free. In December I didn't touch it at all while having a break between patches.
Here you go: https://canvaslegacy.com/
A player has painted the whole starting mine yellow so it looks like a mess in the newbie area but will address that in next patch. :) Also, mobile version is severely lacking so desktop is highly recommended (actually just wrapped up the new mobile client but haven't released it yet).
There are plenty of people looking to get into the games industry, and working on a shipped/existing project can be much less daunting than building your own thing. It might take a bit of time but I'm sure you could find some collaborators, maybe through game jams or meetups?
Also, everyone writes messy code. I wouldn't stress too much about that part.
p.s. Congrats on shipping it! :-)