Hey man, I remember following your project back in the day. Good to see you back.
About the new project - I love the premise, especially the timeline-altering part. Do you have any mechanics implemented though, or at least have an idea on how to implement them? Because it sounds like a pretty huge task if you ask me. There are so many questions, like, when do you consider one character's future broken? Let's say in one dungeon he kills a goblin and finds a health potion, which will save his life a few hours later in a difficult encounter. Let's also assume that a second character kills the same goblin in another playthrough. Is the future broken as soon as the goblin dies, or maybe later, during that difficult encounter where the first character dies?
Also, what happens if the world changes a lot for the first character (e.g. the second character kills the entire village that the first character was supposed to do some questing in)? Does the AI take over?
And what kind of data structure are you going to use to represent the character's actions which will be replayed during subsequent playthroughs?
So many questions, but that's a very interesting problem from the design perspective. I'm really curious how are you going to approach it.
It's huge but I got it broken down in small parts which I'm currently developing. I'm basing the gameplay on a few simple games, so I got that part covered.
The part of breaking a characters future will come after the game loop is complete, so right now the focus is to make it an rpg, than a lewd rpg and then complete it with this feature.
At this point the game will have one world and one story, which then I might expand it to mix fantasy with sci-fi.
The future will break on a very specific way, the first character will play the game, let's say they will go until turn 100, then you start the second character.
You will be able to see the whole history of the first character if you want (or not if set this option off), so you can plan when to meet the first character, if you want to.
So let's say the first character arrived at the dungeon on turn 80, exploring the dungeon takes one turn, because a turn is a day, so the second character can arrive at that dungeon too and since they are both at the same location, the second character can choose to interact or not with the first, if they interact then the first character future is broken. Interact can be talk or fight.
The AI taking over could be a feature, but it would be really the last thing done in the game. For now it's simple to just erase the future of the character.
When we are talking about two characters it is simple enough, one character brings the other character turn back to where it is on the moment it happened.
Now when we talk about several characters, a third interaction for example, I have two options, break everyone's future by bringing the whole game back to that turn or verify only those affected and break their future when it was affected.
A example, character A goes to turn 100, character B break him on turn 80.
So A and B are now at 80.
B continues playing until turn 120.
A then also plays until turn 100.
Character C then breaks B on turn 60.
What happens here is that B goes back to 60 and A goes back to 80, when he/she first met B and they interacted.
The world won't change much, at least for now, so the history of one player might not be visible to another, only the places they went so they can be found there at that turn.
I think I know why it looks so complicated and for me it doesn't, because you might be thinking about a RPG like Baldur's Gate, but it is more like XCom.
You have one base, and random dungeons might pop up so you can explore them and they are gone.
Cities you visit are like visiting a dungeon, you select those of your chars that want to go somewhere, and press to run the day, then it shows you the consequences, visiting a city will bring the city menu, exploring a dungeon will bring the dungeon menu.
What I want to add later is like, cities getting bigger if you help them, or getting smaller if bandits run rampant or like kingdoms having war against one another, so you might have a way to help one or another but everything on a small scale, having like 6-10 characters at maximum, probably. At this point kind like Battle Brothers, but without physically walking the map.
Does it makes sense?
