This is very strange, since 0.2.1 always ended from the prologue straight to the sandbox, even though the scenes weren't ready yet. Don't know what that could be... Try just making a new save then. Haven't seen any incident of being thrown back to the menu.
Yes, I had to start an entirely new save for the sandbox to load at all, and go through the entire prologue again. So you might want to warn people in the Dev Notes that saves made during the prologue in earlier versions may not work. In my saves (which were from a game started in 0.1), I had never seen the sandbox preview, either. It always, always dropped me to menu after the prologue, in every version.
In regards to the "grindiness" of it... Yes, of course you can repeat events, and they will still reward you with 'love points'. This is how any and all sandboxes go.
You get an incentive to max your relationship points with the 3 currently available girls to get 500$ from Greed, money which only serves to unlock extra scenes (detached from the plot) as of now.
The point of the update isn't 'maxing out the points' by grinding... It's interacting with the girls and unlocking all their currently available scenes... As I said, just playing the update.
Playing through all these scenes once each will naturally get your goal with Greed done. It is a placeholder quest anyways - just a means of giving the player money when there's still not any money-making systems available (you only walk around the house for now)
Yeah, having that goal/quest/extras in the game as it currently stands is probably a bad idea, then, even as a placeholder. Without guidance that you
DON'T need to replay events, it incentivizes grinding. And if you don't need to replay events, why make them replayable in the first place, especially since they all show up in the Gallery anyway?
But this all just brings us back to how sandbox gameplay
itself tends to incentivize repetition for both the player and dev, artificially extending the gameplay time without actually adding any engaging gameplay.
For example: What's the purpose of making empty locations clickable? Is it possible for little vignette events to happen in those? Is it possible to find 'hidden' events in them? If so, then you've incentivized clicking all the blank locations
BEFORE going to any locations with known characters, and people may get annoyed at repeatedly clicking empty locations when the vignettes/hidden events don't play (if they're random, or time-locked, etc.). Are the empty locations truly empty? If so, why not just have a menu of choices for who to talk to instead of a map/set of sandbox locations? If empty locations
START OUT as empty, then vignettes or 'hidden' events appear later on without any indication on the navigation, then you're incentivizing gameplay that will cheat people out of scenes.
In any case, sandboxes intentionally add friction to story/gameplay by forcing multiple clicks to get to events that a VN would simply play, or give access to via a menu choice.
Beyond that, since there's no guidance for the sandbox, dropping from prologue straight into a sandbox UI is, as others have said, very jarring.
The plan is to simply open up this world. You can stay at home and experience the family scenes, and eventually go out go other locations to do the same things with other characters.
The "eventually" there is doing some pretty heavy lifting, and is a discouragement from supporting.
As for opening up the world, what's the purpose? It unnecessarily limits story options, because you've got to keep most of the world relatively static, or you start to have to test for certain event completion orders for every event that would otherwise be affected... At which point you're just recreating a branching VN with more work for both you and the players.
If events/characters are limited by time periods (which they are in this game), it's even worse, because you artificially extend gameplay time by incentivizing the click-click-click of trying to find the right time/day for the event you're waiting for (and hoping you don't trigger any automatic events that push past that expected time). It also brings up the specter of potentially-missable events.
It also means now we're stuck click-click-clicking the Pass Time button to try to get the right character in the right place at the right time to be able to trigger an event we didn't unlock yet... Which is artificially-extended gameplay time that doesn't engage, but is instead frustrating.
Special events that further their storylines meaningfully will be unlocked as you develop the relationships. No mystery to that. Though, such an event is still unimplemented for the family girls.
Ah. Then I guess it's an even longer wait for meaningful story progression. Very disappointing even setting aside the grind question.
Fundamentally, I understand you've made the decision to stick with sandbox, and that's fine for your game, but any time there's a promising VN that turns into sandbox, I try to explain why people dislike sandboxes in the hopes that I can convince at least one dev to switch back to a prviously-promising VN.
EDITED TO ADD: You also aren't showing any indication on the navigation when you've already completed an event, so you're making it much more likely that people will
ACCIDENTALLY replay events. There's no difference between the icon showing that an event is available that you've never seen, and an event is available that you
HAVE seen.
