More generally, I'm one of the many, many people who are inherently suspicious of, and usually dislike, sandboxes. But why do people hate sandboxes? Because of the endless and frustrating hunting around for the one event hidden among 21 possible locations. Even now, most devs — even sophisticated and experienced devs...like, say, NLT — do a remarkably poor job of gesturing and hinting, viz "go there tomorrow afternoon" or "Janet's at the store right now." Whereas in this game, with the exception of very early days, there's always something to do, and most of it is consequential (stat-building or a sex/BDSM scene). There are non-consequential scenes as well, but dropping by the pizza place to say hi to Kali is far, far better than clicking on the pizza place on a city map and finding it empty. After the story itself, it's my absolute favorite feature of this particular game.
I am in the camp of preferring sandbox style games, but I can admit there are some
really badly done ones out there. That said though, the same can be said for any style game, many games are just not that well done. Like with anything, you have to wade though a lot of crap to find gems like this.
I do agree, that even if you tell people exactly what to do in the dialogue, you need a good hint system, and you need to make sure you always have something to do in every time slot (if you have time slots). Any time the player has nothing to do, you have a fundamental breakdown.
I've also noticed that there are some time slots during the early days that require players to skip time simply because they don't know what else to do, and I would like to fix this in some way. I may add some random events in there.
One thing I would consider, is to have more things to do in some locations, like more interactions in the hotspring, including letting him relax. Let him take a shower, let Ellen and other side people take showers in other time slots, if no one is using it, he can. Ellen could unlock some things early on to give him something to do. Hell, these could be combined...
The MC could be showering, and Ellen or Lin could come in. Early events, they just leave embarrassed, after some stat goes up, or maybe just after it happens a few times, they start watching him, getting turned on, then then they get naked and offer to wash his back working into a handjob or something, and finally they have sex or something else if you prefer. This could have different girls depending on which time slot or day, you could either schedule it, like you do for the girls in the morning, or more like the utility room, where you could just check to see who is not busy, then randomly pick someone to show up. Lin or Android could come in to clean, Ellen or the others could either be helping the maids or have gotten dirty doing something, and need to clean up, something like that...
He could buy gifts for the girls and give it to them to spend a slot.
The dates should help some, same with the lobby events, maybe if no one is there, we could invite someone to watch tv with us, call them down, if they are home. If it is Lin or Android, you could tell them to take a break with you, if they are working.
Another early event could be you help Lin or Android in the kitchen when they are working for a point, could have a similar one with Ellen, where the MC helps her with some task for some extra money maybe. That would be helpful early on I would think.
Maybe we could buy an ice cream from ICVM-chan, and have the option to give one to one of the girls for points, and a nice heartwarming moment (unless you give them the cum one, then maybe a sexy moment, lol).