Will there be events where we will have to skip an entire week or more to get to?
Usually the way you see time programmed in a VN (based on my limited research) is that people literally hardcode day minimums you have to hit before an event can be trigged, like you need to get to day 160 before you can fuck said character.
The way I've programmed the event system is that the amount of days passed is meaningless, the only time that matters is the section of the day you're on and the day of the week, after that time does not exist and is only pushed forward by the events themselves. Lore-wise this is explained later.
So an event has a day of the week and time of the day that it occurs at and that's it. Each event has a list of prerequisite events that need to occur for it to show up though. So a bisexual scene between two girls will require you to see both of those girls prereq scenes before it automatically appears on it's day. Main events simply occur after the previous main event has been triggered as completed.
It's important to me that the player never feels like they
want to hit the skip button repeatedly to get to content.
Let's say there's a scenario where you've exhausted all the current character scenes in a patch, but you have 3 main events left that all occur on Monday (a worst case scenario). Technically you'd have to skip through to that event right now, but ideally the player is rewarded for also spending time with the girls during their unique animations (think Mei's movie night). Mei's movie night animation currently has 14 very short scripts to pull from so that every time you spend time with her you get a slightly different interaction. Also whenever your relationship "levels up" with a girl the animation will change, so on the next version of Mei's movie night she'll be slightly closer to the MC, sitting in a different position. It's designed this way so that if you're playing through the game, maybe you'll say "hey, I haven't sat in the library with Emiho for a while" and be rewarded for doing so. Instead of the typical "You spent time with Emiho, +1 to relationship." Is it mandatory to do so? No. But there will eventually be benefits to doing so.
Most of the girls will have one of these animations in the next patch, and Mei will have one new one (because she's the star).
It's up to me as the designer to ensure that these animations/scripts feel rewarding to take part in.
But I also have the ability to just query the event lists and see if there's nothing available and just stuff a big skip button directly on the page to take you to the next week or something. I understand some people are impatient, we'll see how it goes.
(Also, how much of the inspiration for Emiho was YunYun from Konosuba?)
I'm curious how the full version will implement toggleable horror sections.
Regarding the sandbox elements, I'm for it if it's done well with no affection grinding and no constant searching for the next character story (or if it at least contains an integrated guide).
I'll be honest. I don't watch much anime and I have never heard of Konosuba. I actually have to do research into stuff when I try to add specific anime references... or rely on my teammate who does watch, and reads a lot of manga.
Horror scenes that I feel are actually scary will be replaced by a short narration that appears on the screen to explain what happened in a non-scary way, so for that ending scene in the demo it would just be "the MC passes out after seeing a flashback of Mei in the shower, a screeching noise overwhelming his senses" or something stupid like that, then it'll just skip ahead to the next image. I don't expect many people to use this so I won't put major effort into it. That said, I've got some pretty fucked up horror shit planned for far in the future so who knows.
There will be no affection grinding in this game. But in the future girls will react positively to an MC who spends time with her often.