About

Scattered Legends: Beyond Earth and Sky is the first in a series of branded RPGs. The RPGs in the Scattered Legends series are planned to have many similar elements, such as item names, reoccurring character names, shared themes, etc.

Beyond follows the tale of someone from the earth tribe, a group of people living deep underground to avoid the harsh, ice-age like surface, as he discovers a land floating in the sky and a plot that is destroying his home.

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User Interfaces

Beyond uses many different interfaces, ranging from battle interfaces and dialog systems to menus and touch controls. Each interface consists of two parts: a design part and a blueprints based code part, except for the in-game touch controls, which are managed entirely with blueprints code.

The main menu interface was designed to be accessed by dragging down from the top of the screen, much the same way as the notification bar on Android. It was then coded to be navigated by swiping left/right/up to change pages or return to the game. Each page interacts with various parts of the game, including a save-game screen, inventory screen, and player party details.

Dialogs were constructed so that messages could be displayed at the bottom of the screen, optionally with a speaker name appended to the box. Dialogs themselves were set up to be created by creating a pointer-like chain of objects that hold the necessary information for proper display, namely: speaker names and message text.

The battle interface is a Work-in-progress, especially since the battle system has had a recent design overhaul. As it stands, the battles were coded with a dynamic turn-based system, where certain actions can have various effects on the turn order. Combat works by tapping targets, and then selecting actions from a radial pop-up menu.

Progression and Persistence

As part of the progression system for Beyond, a set of globally tracked variables was set up so that levels, when loading, could adjust their contents based on the progression state of the game. It primarily consists of a set of indexed booleans that are stored in an engine provided static object and persisted to save files, along with player party information, inventory, money, and other such stats.

Inventories and Data Management

A player party in Beyond consists of an inventory, money, and player data objects, which tracks data such as health, stats, level, and equipment. Most of this data is displayed to the player in the main menu, and function calls have been provided to assist level editors in its manipulation.

Environment Interactions

Various elements of the environment can be interacted with by the player. These interactions have the capability of triggering dialog, gaining items, or just about anything the level designer needs the interaction to be able to do. Some common interactables have been provided, such as treasure chests.

A Work in Progress

Systems-wise, most of the core of Beyond is complete, except for the battle system. Content-wise, Beyond is still in the early stages, having only a few, in-construction maps for the player to explore, and very few art assets. A framework is in place for their addition, however, with ways in place to handle level loading, music transitions, progress persistence, and such.