(game dev) What I did in the past was having actions generate both a new state, and a stack of 'instructions' that update the UI, which was deliberately not a 1

(game dev) What I did in the past was having actions generate both a new state, and a stack of 'instructions' that update the UI, which was deliberately not a 1:1 representation of the game state for the exact reasons you described. Then you can 'execute' the stack within a command VM of some sorts, where instructions can move sprites around, play sounds, etc. You can have 'high level' instructions ("display the enemy's death") implemented as a combination of low level instructions ('reduce that health bar count until it goes to zero' -> 'change entity X's sprite to dead sprite' -> 'give player 200 gold as reward' -> 'play sound' -> 'change text in the text bar to something' -> ...) It ended up working waaay better than what I was expecting, felt very easy to reason about, wasn't hard to maintain, and scratched that itch of implementing an interesting solution. :)