Switching character perspectives and auto-loading

[Ceresbane]

I want to be able to use a system like that of games like disgaea infinite and infinite loop where you are a voyeur of events that can switch between the perspective of characters.

Plus I would like to mimic the games' ability to automatically go back in time to a specified checkpoint whenever a bad end occurs instead of the default of going to the title screen.

How do you approach this?

[astrobread]

I haven't played the game, but from reading wikipedia it sounds like I'm working on a similar system.

So far my plan is to create a screen that shows all the visited branches in the timeline as a series of imagebutton icons. The player can pull this up at any time, and by clicking an icon they jump to that point in the story. With something like that in place, all you have to do is show the timeline screen after reaching a bad end. Then the player can return to an earlier point in the story instead of going to the title. To handle multiple character perspectives you'd add multiple timelines, one for each character.

Nothing too complicated really, just a screen with imagebuttons that execute jump statements. But it could rapidly become pretty interesting depending on how complicated you want to make it. I'm still working out all the implications, so I'm definitely interested if anyone else has worked on something similar.