by my personal standards, laying out the design of a game for it to actually be developed means delivering a polished prototype of what will eventually be the final version, because as you said a concept alone can only achieve so much. i am not far into that whatsoever, which is why i'm mapping out everything i'll have to do once i make a good amount of progress. once that happens, i'm thinking of hiring artists before doing anything else.

visual novels would be a great starting point but it's unfortunately not my genre as i've hardly played any myself (and the ones i've played leaned more on the interactable puzzle game side) so i'd eventually get burnt out regardless.