Best approach for designing game world with multiple time/day variations?

hi everyone,

My co-dev and I are currently working on a game using Construct 3, which will be a sequel to our previous game which can be found here:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2245890/Margo/https://store.steampowered.com/app/2245890/Margo/.

We need some advice on the best approach to design our game world. Our game requires the same areas to appear differently depending on the time of day and the day of the week. For example, the appearance and elements in the town center would change from morning to afternoon to evening and day to day.

At first, we thought we could just create separate layouts for each time of day and day of the week:

This seems straightforward because we can manually place everything we need and know exactly what will exist in each level. The downside is that it would be impossible and unnecessary to have a layout for each scene time/day, and if there was a change in any of the art,(which there inevitably will be) we’d have to change it amongst multiple layouts. As well, we would have to pick and choose which scenes to make new layouts for and what elements change at runtime, which could be annoying for debugging. We would like to find a more structured, data-driven approach but are just a little unsure what concepts to look into or how other devs do this.

Our desired gameplay might be likened to "Night in the Woods" although we are not sure how similar the systems would really be to theirs.

We would love to hear from anyone who's dealt with this kind of complexity in construct. What would you recommend for managing different states of the same area? Are there any pitfalls we should be aware of, or tips you could share to make this process smoother?

Thanks for your help!:)

I would consider using shaders.

For example a palette swapper if you would like to keep the assets identical, but just try to color change for the afternoon/night. Or other shader overlays which can change the mood drastically and also dynamically. Additionaly you could enable a second layer with night related assets or effects, for example lights, which could be simple sprite assets, using blend modes or again, effects.

Another approach would be to loop through different animation frames (or full animations) for each asset, if you feel like you prefer to create multiple variations instead of only changing the palette. That way you only need 1 layout and just set the animation (or animation frame) to either day, afternoon or night whenever you need it.