I was mostly curious how other devs approach decisions that may branch off into different results.
I've been toying with this idea for 1 or 2 features in a project of mine that will have long lasting repercussions (basically, once you make the decision you get 1 of 2 game-long rewards).
An example of choosing armor over a weapon, as an example. Are there maybe some advanced methods for dealing with this sort of thing -- other than event flags?
In my experience, this is just handled by using variables. (Maybe what you're calling "event flags.") When you present the player with a menu, remember the choice he/she made. Best to do this for every choice offered - variables cost very little, and you never know when, in 0.5, you might decide that that choice in 0.1 should now be significant.
Oh, you can bundle the variables into class instances, if you want. But you don't have to - I've seen both sandbox and visual novel-type games that just use a whole series of simple yes/no variables, and I've seen others that use all sorts of more advanced storage mechanisms. A lot of it comes down to how you want/like to code.
Note, for most VN's, (IMHO) doing anything other that vanilla variables is probably overcomplicating things. This may be different for sandbox games. For example, in
Whores of Thrones (for which I'm the coder) I developed a whole "quest-and-event" framework because that allowed me to very easily add events and deal with the fact that the player may execute them in any order. Not that it HAD to be done that way - it was just what seemed to make sense to me from a programming point of view. But for the VN's for which I've been the coder, that kind of sophistication was almost never warranted.
Basically, my advice is to choose the simplest method that will do the job well, an the one that you understand the best. Complexity for complexity's sake is an anti-pattern.
