hikarinakano wrote:Okay, it seems I need to describe the rules of my world for this to seem a little more feasible. There is no jumping forward in time, only jumping backwards to the beginning of a day. If you jump backwards, everything that happens after the point you jump back to becomes null and void, in a form of timeline collapse, and then a new timeline is "generated" from whenever you jump back to.
I expected there to be no jumping forward in time, holding in Ctrl already does that, I added that in my example because it was one of the few statistically correct calculations I could do from the top of my head. But it's good to have this confirmed.
I do intend to have a "map" of sorts to keep track of what happens on what day.
Something like
this? (One of the first image results when googling YU-NO a.d.m.s.) Not neccesarily to keep track of what happens in a day, but to keep track of all the different timelines.
The character that allows you to jump to the past is preventing the end of the world from happening at the end of the month at the hands of the antagonist. Being a character herself, she has personal rules that she doesn't allow you to infringe upon. These rules are:
1: You cannot jump forwards in time, because A: that's wasting time, and B: It's entirely possible that you'd be dead at the beginning of the day you jump to.
2: You can only travel backwards within the relevant plot. You can't travel back more than (around, still going through my details) 10 days before the start of the story.
3: If you do happen to die at any point, she reserves the right to reset that day, but since physical contact is necessary to do so, if the two characters are significantly separated then there's nothing that she can do, since resetting the day wouldn't take your consciousness back in time too.
I already expected 2, it would be crazy if you could travel back to the Jura era or WWII just for laughs. And if you could go terminator and kill the antagonist as a toddler, it wouldn't be any fun either. But I do hope you have a reason why the protagonist won't go back a bit further, like going to the time that the antagonist was still vulnerable while planning a few things or recruiting their hencemen? Off course, if the antagonist is unaware of what is about to happen themselves until the apocalypse begins (Like some mysterious power residing within them about to burst out?), or if the time travel has a limited range for some reason, this problem could be easily solved.
In fact, I like hearing that you can go to several days before the initial start of the story. It will help with the readers feeling like they're actually traveling through time, and can cause some interesting perspectives and changes in the timeline. Are you planning to foreshadow certain event by having people talk about it and then allow the player to go to those scenes, or a system where you find out certain knowledge and unlock the ability to travel back further in time? (Like finding an abandoned hideout of the antagonist and getting the option to travel 10 days in the past to when it was still in use, while it wasn't possible to travel more than two days back before? This because the time traveler saw no purpose in going a few more days back into the past before your discovery.)
3: Ah, so you can go game over and the time traveler has to go back to a point in time on her own? Meet up with the protagonist who's already been introduced to some parts of the plot and experienced few time jumps, but not the most recent ones? Yes, I believe this phenomenom is called 'save files'.
All kidding aside, it would be pretty awesome if you could make her remember things that the reader witnessed while the protagonist cannot. I believe 'Her tears were my light' did something like this, for a reference of what ren'py coding can do.
No, I don't have the exact code right now, but I have a vague, clay-like idea of how it will work. Involving a lot of variables and jump functions, and also some new interface design and script. I have a clear image in my mind of how I want it to look and work.
Good, I'd still advice that spreadsheet or some other system to actually write it out, the system in your head can seem a lot more solid than it really is, and test your code in a small mock-VN to see if it actually works. It would be a real time-waster if you implement it into the game and found out it doesn't do what it's supposed to do.
Keep in mind, too, that there are only a finite number of endings (about 32-52 off of about 8 routes, not including the rare death end). The story's jumps only affect so much. There are multiple conditions for each end, so the story doesn't completely diverge into something else every time you jump. It's usually only a small divergence, which will only significantly change the plot when combined with other choices, jumps, and some optional degree of randomness. Depending on the scene, there are usually One to two alternate scenes for every scene in the standard route, but in the darker routes it varies a little more wildly.
It's a good thing that you already thought out the story enough to give an estimation of your routes and endings, but 30-50 endings is still quite a lot. I hope for your sake that most of them are indeed only subtely different from one another.
And one last question: Is the antagonist aware of the time manipulation?