Those renders look great, but what about a screen or 2 showing the UI ? I think it's important since it's a sandbox game. I think one thing sandbox games should avoid, especially at the begining, are "empty places". Lots of places to visit, but most of them being empty because of the early development, or just because they are only used for very few scenes but stay available all the time.
An other thing important about sandboxes, is that they often require grinding (relationship for example, or some other stats). I don't mind grinding as long as they are not boring.
For example, having to eat or wash every day, even if it's realistic, isn't interesting. That being say, you can make events taking place during meals or when in the bathroom of course.
An other grinding aspect is money. Usually, it's working. It can be boring (just click work, spend time/energy, gain money every day), or it can be interesting, with characters related to the money making process, or with frequent mini-events related to it, making it interesting for the player instead of a chore.
Same thing with relationship, but usually, it's the best develop grind in games, so I'm not too worried here.
And finally, don't underestimate the eye candy, it's important !
P.S : Don't you foresee issues with Patreon's crusade against incest ?
Thank you so much for showing this much interest in our game. I think starting with the most important aspect of your message is the most logical move so I'll explain the Patreon problem.
We are aware of the Patreon's view on incest themes and that is the main reason we have a different story on our patreon page. While it is not the one we are trying to build our game upon, it is a slightly changed version of it. According to our patreon page this game will be about a boy who is living with an extremely friendly family who just happen to love him like their own. Standard landlord, childhood friend diversion. Now we are not extremely sure that this is going to work as we intend it to, we are also not expecting a purge since there are tons of incest games with different stories in their patreon page. For example
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has a patreon page for his games and one of those is a pretty incest game called Milfy City.
We will have two different UI designs for the game and demo. The UI for our demo which is very simplified version of the actual game since we are not including the full sandbox environment in the demo. They are under constant change at the moment and we really don't want to share something that unfinished. You can expect a showcase for it shortly before the demo release though.
About the grinding, we are planning to include tons of mechanics which will resemble RPG elements like skill&stat system which we will use to determine the players success chance on some events/availability of some choices etc. They will certainly require a balanced amount of enjoyable grind but we are not expecting our players to fill every single skill and stat to the brim to be honest. Realistically you will need to be a character with expert level of knowledge on some things while being a complete beginner on others. We are working on an easy mode to make things go smoother for grind hating members of our future audience though.
Relationship system is more like a checkpoint system which determines the things you can and can't do with a certain character. For example when you meet a certain side character, you will get to know her and get her to know you slowly. During that time, depending on your success, either you will proceed to the next level, get her number(which will be usable for a lot of things) or fail miserably to get her attention. From that point you can either get a second chance with her or lose her completely. We are aware of this being just a game but we also want to include as much realism as we can along the way. Long story short, we don't want our game to be ''Aim, bang, pick a new target, aim, bang, repeat''.
You have mentioned eating, bathing kind of interactions and most of them being boring elements that you will have to do because they mostly play a huge part on your ability to progress. Well actually you will see that kind of stuff in our game and frankly, not including them feels a bit unrealistic. To counter that boring repetition we are planning random events that can happen during those interactions. Imagine making coffee for yourself, someone randomly (if their daily schedule allows it of course) approach you, start talking and ultimately joins you during that event, it might even lead to a completely different event if we can manage to write that ''chain event'' mechanic.
About the money making/spending, we are planning some innovative stuff on that aspect but we are not completely comfortable with sharing those at the moment. You can be sure about one thing though, we won't include money, actually anything, for the sake of including it. We are definitely planning tons of stuff for everything we will include.
I can not speak for other developers but for me (we are a 2 man project and I am the one responsible for renders and public interactions along with other stuff) it is more of a design choice rather than a hardware issue. I am using dForce on every clothing item that I choose for our characters. Long hair tend to turn that simulation process to a nightmare. If I choose to make it invisible during the simulation and make it visible after it is done, it will clip trough body parts and outfit. Currently I do not have any good dForce dynamic hair assets and to be honest, I don't think there are any good looking ones out there anyway. After earning enough, we are planning to hire a temporary 3D artist to design dForce hairs for us. You will see long hairs after that for sure.
On the linearity subject, you will be able to experience a completely linear story if that is your choice. We are not forcing you to explore every single side story, different environments etc. You can strictly stick to the main characters and if you follow the designated path which we will include with a smart guidance system, the game will feel like a complete linear story. We are also planning an alternative for linear narrative lovers such as yourself but it is fairly early to talk about it now.
I really hope this answers your questions. We are really happy to see such an interest from you. Hopefully we will manage to create something that you will enjoy very much. o/ make sure to check our patreon page since we are sharing stuff there too. Most of the development related stuff are public there.
