In sandbox porn game...

[mgtoons]

That it is not a repetitive clicker with you doing the same thing over and over and over to get the next little morsel. Don't go overboard on stats or having to be in location x at time y for some inane reason. Tell a story, let it flow with a good pace. I think the best example of sandbox games that do a good job of this are the NLT games Lust Epidemic and Treasures of Nadia.

 

[konabwo]

i responded mainly because it was a quite categorical statement which
1.might be discouraging/causing some unbearable burden to a newbie dev.
2.went against common and accepted approaches (which do work fine)
imo typical95f narrative-driven/quest-based sandboxes represents no less than a half of not-100%-VN games (so other 50% or less is all sorts of datesims/trainers and vns-into-sandboxes).
it appears that contrary to datesims such are just meant to grow "vertically" (devs put new events on a quest chain, add new npcs) ...not "horizontaly" (adding new interactive options or lewd options to toy with chosen npc, or some mini-gigs to fill the void inbetween dating-mating-bedrooming) incorporating the latter approach is possible but i think the main problem is that devoting too much attention is possible only at the expense of quests chain. also could be a risky move as a playerbase expects some story development and tasks progressing.