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How do you handle multiple states/ versions of a single scene?
I'm working on a 2D game, and the player can visit the same location multiple times in the game. Some times that location is seen during the evening, other times during the morning, rainy days etc.
The art is done by hand/ without using lights, so for a rainy scene I give all my sprites a grey tint, for evenings a reddish tint and so on.
Also, the NPCs in that location say different dialogues on the second visit as compared to the first time the player goes to that location. Some NPCs are also absent in the later visits, and some quests also depend on which day it is.
Fortunately for me, the game is linear, which means there's a finite and pre determined number of times the player can go to that location, and I decide the state of the scene for each visit. It'll always be rainy on the second day, the quest will always occur on the third day etc (for a combined total of 6 possible days)
This means that I've copy pasted the scene and made changes each time to create 6 different versions of that scene for each day. This works fine, but I'm worried that if I need to make any big changes to the scene later on, I'll have to replicate those changes for each copy. This may or may not be a big time sink, but maybe there's a more efficient way to go about it?
The other way I can think of is to put the contents of all 6 days within one scene, and use AC to make sprites visible/ invisible according to variables, and have all Action lists for different days within this one scene. But this might make the scene huge, and could also turn out to be very confusing to handle.
How do you guys deal with this kind of stuff? Any tips or obvious methods that I'm missing? 
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It could be an integer (i.e. to indicate "Day 1", "Day 2" etc), but if you also have morning/evening states, then you could make a PopUp variable instead for greater control ("Day 1 morning", "Day 2 afternoon" etc).
You could then use that to affect other variables. For instance, a boolean "Is raining" variable could be used to control the raining effect. An ActionList asset could be used to determine if the current "Day state" PopUp results in the "Is raining" boolean is set to True or False, and you could then run this list every time you update the PopUp value.
Making various sprites invisible/visible (or teleporting in and out of view) is one way to make visual changes, but if you're dealing with changing the same thing (e.g. the background sprite), you can also use animation to control the appearance of a single object. Unity's Animator system can be used to create animations that control the appearance of a single sprite, and then AC's "Object: Animate" Action can be used to playback the animations accordingly.