Oh
polywog, always with the hard reality.
But honestly, text based games can do fine, for those of us old enough to remember AIF(if not look it up, goblinboy ect.), some of the best AIF was image free, not that images aren't great but you don't need loads of visuals to make a good game.
Fundamentally there are three roles to fill IMO: Programmer, Writer and Artist(be it 3dcg, 2d art, photo images ect.) do you intend to write and program? do you want an artist to work with you or do you want to commission art piece by piece the way some text based games do? (night games and monster girl dreams do this, both good BFRPGs that are text based).
The way i see it is like this:
The programmer is responsible for how the game runs, gameplay, UI, how things are handled like choices, inventory, battle system(where appropriate), under the hood stuff ec.
The writer is responsible for the story, dialogue, characterisation, setting ect.
The Artist is the low man on the totem pole in a lot of ways, he just fulfils the remit set out by the writer, that said he is probably the guy who has the biggest effect on bringing in players.
I know, that's all fine and stuff but how does that help you? well you've got the programmer on board already, which is actually one of the harder people to find, part of the reason so many stick to ren'py is the ease of programming in ren'py meaning that they can get by with minimal coding skills. this means you don't have to stick to the "standard" model of ren'py or RPGM +DAZ(3dcg program, used in probably 50% of the games on this site at this point, it's not that hard to learn and i'll get to that in a moment) this means i see a few ways forward for you:
You've got programming down, so why not try to learn one of the other two main skills, writing or art? well i suspect you already, as for writing this is both the easiest to get into and the hardest to master. Stories are subjective, i love Tolkien but my SO would sooner pry her eyes out than read the description of the shire again, write what you would like to read but do it as well as possible, if you're interested look into something called "narratology" or the study of storytelling and narrative, it's pretty interesting IMO. As a note to this in what presumably is going to be a 18+ sex game you need to think about what fetishes your going to be playing to, no point in aiming for a fetish you really don't like, you won't do it justice, I personally couldn't make a game oriented around peep, it just feels creepy to me. In addition a really great blog post i read by an adult auther put it this way(roughly), "in an action movie the action has to advance the plot, in adult writing the sex has to advance the plot" basically the sex can't just be "tacked on" if you want the story to work well.
As for learning art, well some like the creator of good girl gone bad trace images, creating there own derivative artwork that they can use as the want, others pick up relatively easy to use 3dcg programs like honey select or DAZ, i'm familiar with DAZ as i've been playing around with it for a couple of years now, i'm still well bellow what a good dev can do but there are daz game devs out there worse than me and i have no background in photography, 3d art, modelling, rendering or any of that stuff and i've not exactly been pouring hours into it either, amazing what you can do with a few good tutorials, forum posts and trial and error.
IMO try something small first, remember the old AIF minicomp's?, no? well the idea is to have a small sex game limited to three rooms and make it fast a lean, then submit them for judges to compare and then they would be released together as a variety bucket sort of affair, i was a fan personally. What i mean is think of a nice simple "easy" text based game to stretch our legs on, get some writing practise in and come back in a few months and try to recruit an artist, or try DAZ.
One final note on setting, people seem to like (in order of what i think preference is): modern contemporary, fantasy, post apoc, sci-fi. now the end of that list is missing cyberpunk, that's because that is IMO a little of both post apoc and sci-fi, but by miles modern is the most commonly used, then fantasy then "the rest", but honestly do what you want to do, if you find modern boring go for something else, make a game you want to make.
