Craft, cook, farm, build and explore to your heart's content in this magical journey of self-discovery aboard a giant flying ship, available on PC and Nintendo Switch.
Pre-order store is now open! Get a discount on the game before its release, and for a limited-time, access to some rewards from the successful Kickstarter campaign.
Latest Updates from Our Project:
Dev Update #17
10 days ago
– Wed, May 08, 2024 at 11:11:12 AM
Hello, Travelers!
It’s been a very busy couple of weeks for our studio. Why, you ask? We’re happy to report that we’ve been preparing for the…
The Wholesome Direct 2024 will showcase the future of cozy and uplifting gaming. You can expect one hour of exclusive footage and announcements from more than 70 upcoming indie games, including our very own Sally. We’re quite excited to be part of the showcase, and we can’t wait to show you what we’ve been working on!
Speaking of which, remember how last month, we told you something was brewing aboard the Sally?
The Magic Room A new area has emerged: the magic room! This cozy area is meant to be a relaxing lounging spot, with its cushy armchairs and warm lights near a fireplace focal point.
The magic room also has its own workstation: the cauldron. Two big pots are sitting comfortably in the area, gurgling with a mix of mystery ingredients. For anyone willing to try, a cauldron can be used to turn almost anything into a magic potion. All it takes is a little bit of patience, elbow grease, and the secret ingredient: a moonveil crystal.
Magic is its own specialization aboard the Sally, which means that making potions will earn you specific experience points. These experience points can then be exchanged for perks and skills, making your character grow from magic apprentice to expert moonweaver.
This room also caters to the casual (and not-so-casual) trinkets, rocks, and treasures collector. A blue shelving unit at the back of the room allows crewmates to display their favorite objects for everyone to enjoy. We couldn’t dream of having a magic room without a good shelf of trinkets!
We can’t wait for you to brew some warm potions near the fireplace in this brand-new area. Until then, we have our work cut out for us. We’ll be back next month with more news, and a brand-new Sally showcase during the 2024 Wholesome Direct. The event starts at 9AM PT/ 12PM ET, on June 8th! Safe travels, and thank you for being part of this adventure. Your devoted Sally team, Lucid Tales
Dev Update #16
about 1 month ago
– Fri, Apr 05, 2024 at 01:25:38 PM
Hello, Travelers!
We’ve writing this update after we’ve shovelled ourselves out of the latest spring snowfall. The first rule of Canadian winters is that they’re not over until after they’ve proven you wrong for thinking they were done. They do like to surprise everyone, like they have a mind of their own. In that sense, they’re not unlike our Sally NPCs. Let’s check on their latest progress.
NPC Shenanigans In the last update, we’ve explained our objectives with the NPCs, and illustrated ways in which we must help them appear sentient. At that point, we had divided the work to be done in smaller objectives, and started out a testing phase. The characters had gained an inventory, and started picking up objects by themselves. Now that we’ve had a few more weeks of work under our belt, they’ve gained more independence. NPCs are now able to have ideas - so to speak.
For now, their behavior is being tested in a special map filled with our current stations. Stations are interactive installations. They’re what you’ll be able to interact with to modify resources in your inventory. A cutting board, for example, cuts a carrot into carrot slices; Woody the sawmill changes trees into planks. Both are stations, and both are currently available to our NPCs in their little playground.
As of now, our characters are able to want a selection of different items. Some of them they can acquire by themselves. In their playground, the NPCs can spawn basic resources and ingredients. If they decide they want a bag of flour, they just make one appear, pick it up, and proceed to victory dance. If they want a carrot stew, though, they’ll need to grab ingredients, chop them up, and use the cooking pot to mix them altogether. That means two stations must be used correctly; just like a real player would, but without the use of opposable thumbs on a keyboard or controller.
Travelers, know that when our team first witnessed a character make a stew all by themselves, there were cheers. Was it the best stew that ever stewed? Well…Not so much. Maybe that’s because that particular crewmate decided to mix flour with more flour, with a side of diced potato. We weren’t exactly expecting a high-end meal from that starchy mess, but it was an important milestone in the grand tapestry of future NPC behaviors.
Wait a Minute Cooking a meal is great, but what happens to all the other crewmates while our starch enthusiast is making stew? Nothing, really. A nothing that had to be thought out and designed, of course.
We’ve now incorporated a queue for all NPCs. If a station is occupied, characters will simply wait for their turn, or busy themselves with another task. Different idle animations have been added to their register. Waiting crewmates will be walking around, sitting down, and passing time; not breathing down the neck of the character cutting carrots.
There is also a queue for performance. Asking our machines to calculate behavior for multiple crewmates simultaneously takes up resources. Distributing those calculations in a queue, however, means that the game always runs smoothly. There’s a lot happening: characters are using stations, picking up objects, displaying different animations. Therefore, they always look busy, even though it’s - for lack of a better term - not their turn to use the collective braincells.
This NPC is calculating their next move.
Spring Cleaning Backstage, we’ve also made changes to how the different game mechanics are being coded. Our team of programmers have come together to refine the process, and file everything into its neat little category. Every station has code for the station itself, the playable character, and the NPCs. This allows our programmers to be in charge of the category they’re overseeing, and makes for a much more optimized code. Optimization is always on our minds, since Sally has to run flawlessly on platforms of different capacities.
Tackling the work to be done on a specific station simultaneously, on three different fronts, also makes for efficient work. It’s been really rewarding to see new game mechanics emerge as the Sally experience gets shapen into form.
The Foundry Incidentally, shaping things into form is the exact purpose of our newest station: the foundry. This station uses ore to create different casts, like metal ingots, rods, and sheets.These will be used to craft more complicated objects. Barrels, for example, will be made with sheets of metal from the foundry, added to wooden planks from the sawmill, assembled in a future woodworking station.
Multiple stations gives every player and crewmates greater freedom to do what they enjoy doing. If melted metal is their jam (not to be put on toast), they can happily tend to the foundry station. Sheets of metal can be given to a fellow crewmate who’s keen on actually using them for something. Narratively-wise, the use of multiple stations also mirror real-life tasks better. There’s solace to be found in the little steps of daily life. We’re hoping the Sally experience can bring that feeling forth, in a safe and magical world devoid of stress or pressure.
That’s it for now, travelers! Happy total solar eclipse this Monday to everyone lucky enough to witness it. Please remember to protect your eyes, if you do. On our end, we’re quite excited to observe what feels like a magical event. Who knows, we might use the inspiration to brew something special for your next update… Your devoted Sally team, Lucid Tales
Dev Update #15
2 months ago
– Tue, Mar 12, 2024 at 02:19:15 PM
Hello, Travelers!
Let’s spring into what we’ve been up to these past few weeks, shall we?
How Much Wood Can Woody Chuck Last month, we’ve unveiled the newest addition to the Sally: the machine room. As promised, it’s since then been furnished with some brand new workstations. One of them is in charge of turning trees into planks. Say hello to Woody!
Woody is the Sally’s sawmill.
Woody’s design ensures the crew’s safety, since its dangerous saws are out of reach. It might still need some upkeeping from time to time, so your character might interact with it in an array of ways; but not with any sharp parts! Everyone is safe aboard the Sally.
Speaking of which, please know that we’re putting extra thought in Sally’s game design and mechanics to respect the world’s ecosystem. Since the crew uses different natural resources like wood, it will also safeguard these resources to secure their future. Mechanics will be put in place to take only what is needed, and/or regrow what has been taken. We believe there’s something beautiful in exploring a pristine, natural floating island. Turning woody islands into barren deserts would not fit into Sally’s narrative, nor would it serve the feeling of wonder we hope to instill in players experiencing the game.
However, that doesn’t mean players will be bound to more responsibilities. The Sally’s crew is a team, and you’ll have a say in which tasks your character prefers to undertake. If you’d rather feed the crew a delicious stew whilst they’re hard at work replanting some trees, that’s a valid option! Which also brings us to our next point…
NPC Tasks Everything you can do aboard the Sally can also be achieved by your crewmates. The character you will be playing is not the Grand Hero of the Sally. They’re just part of the crew! An important part of the crew, yes: exactly like everyone else. This is the core of the game’s creative direction, and it bears its lot of fun design and game mechanics challenges.
We might unveil more of these challenges in the future, but for now, let’s focus on the mechanics. If all crewmates can perform the same actions, that means that your character may enter a room and see an action being performed. But from a programming standpoint, allowing a playable character and an NPC to perform a task that is seemingly the same are two very different things.
Let’s take ingredient prepping, for example. As your character approaches the cutting board station, their inventory will pop up. That’s a necessary step that lets you choose which ingredient you’d like to cut. But in an NPC’s case, that has to be programmed differently. You wouldn’t want to walk into a room just to have little Jimmy’s inventory pop-up in your face. Same goes with the actual mechanics: when using the cutting board, you have to move the joystick or press a button to handle the knife, which will determine how your character cuts. This has to be automated when an NPC is at a station, since there’s no actual joystick to be moved.
Additionally, our approach needs to be different from games where non-playable characters have routines. In Sally, every playthrough means different crewmates; we can’t schedule the daily activities of an evergrowing pool of possible crewmates. They must act like they’re sentient - so to speak. Therefore, they have to decide when to visit a station in the first place! No one will let Jimmy hog the cutting board if his pockets are full of rocks, otherwise the ship might go hungry. Crewmates will also have to act according to their personnality, mood and preferences, which complexifies the process. As you can see, there’s a lot to take into consideration as we program the NPCs behaviors, and what can be perceived by the player.
These past weeks, we’ve divided that colossal task into smaller, achievable objectives. We’ve also started coding and testing the first steps, using the game mechanics that are already available in-game. Making the NPCs interact with their surroundings is an endeavor that ramifies with virtually every addition to the game. However, the results will be well-worth it. The crew will behave in an unpredictable but coherent way, mimicking what life would really feel like aboard a giant magical ship.
Find your Way The ship is indeed giant. “Find your way” is in every way Sally’s premise, but it’s meant to stay a metaphor. We have to make sure it doesn’t become an unfortunate summary of the gameplay. This month, we’ve begun to tackle the issue of navigation aboard the Sally for both the NPCs and the players.
First of all, we’re developping a room identification system. All rooms are identified in-engine to let the NPCs navigate accurately. The system can include relevant information, like temperature or difficulty of the type of terrain. That information could be helpful in various ways, like determining where the crewmates enjoy spending their time. For example, if a character dislikes the cold, you might often find them in the machine room if that area is identified as the warmest part of the ship.
The system will also be useful to help trigger certain location-specific events, and guide you during quests. For instance, if someone asks you to meet them somewhere, the identification system will know exactly when you take a step into the area, triggering the right chain of events.
Since this will mostly be helpful behind the scenes, we’re also relying on the simple magic of… good old wooden signs. These are in addition to the player’s map, of course. Adding directions around the Sally will make the discovery of the ship a little easier. Alternatively, all signs will be readable and provide extra information for accessibility purposes.
"To go or not to go in the kitchen?", Arsène ponders.
Whilst our character is busy wondering if they’ll march up the stairs, we’ll be going back to our list of March tasks and objectives. Take care, travelers - we will be back soon with more game development news! Your devoted Sally team, Lucid Tales
Dev Update #14
3 months ago
– Wed, Feb 21, 2024 at 08:26:58 AM
Hello, travelers!
Have you ever wondered how the Sally flies? This big ship has a good set of sails and paddles, but it also needs a little help from…
The Machine Room This month, an entire new area has appeared aboard the ship: the machine room! It is home to the Sally’s crystal core, which keeps the vessel airborne. The room has been designed and modelized, and textures are getting their final touches. Ready to see what it looks like? Here’s a little preview:This is an important space, which also happens to take an important amount of space. After all, many Sally upkeeping tasks will be done in the machine room. New crafting workstations are planned to appear in the near future. You can picture this room bustling with crewmates once the ship takes flight! Depending on your own choice of preferred tasks, you might spend a considerate amount of time there yourself.
Worldbuilding and Game Design These past weeks, we’ve added to Sally’s worldbuilding, and had some very fruitful design sessions - although, sorry to say, that’s all we can say about that. We might be keeping secrets, but we promise it’s exciting secrets.
Reaction Animations As you might remember from a previous update, our animation team has been working on conversation reactions. They’re mixing the crewmates’ baseline emotions - Anger, Disgust, Enjoyment, Sadness, Success, and Surprise - with the context they might be displayed with during dialogue. This has resulted in 42 new conversation animations! Here is an example of a character giving out a quip of information, in three different flavors. Can you guess which three emotions they’re feeling?If you’ve said surprise, anger, and enjoyment, congratulations, you’ve got it!
The Fox Trots How is our friendly fox from last month? Now that its 3D mesh has a functioning set of bones - and the controllers to move them efficiently - our animation team has started to work their magic. This little guy has now begun to trot around the forest, to everyone’s enjoyment.
Thanks for reading, travelers. We’ll see you next month for more game development news. Safe travels to all of you! Your devoted Sally team, Lucid Tales
Dev Update #13
4 months ago
– Tue, Jan 23, 2024 at 10:38:22 AM
Hello, travelers,
A very happy new year to you, and all the best wishes for 2024! Speaking of best wishes, ours have been granted- but more on that front later. First of all, let’s talk about 2023.
New beginnings A new year often feels like a clean slate, especially after a quick holiday break. We took that opportunity to look back at everything we’ve accomplished in 2023. You’re of course familiar with most of what’s been done on the development front, thanks to these monthly updates. We’ve added multiple assets, updated the ship, re-rigged our characters and worked on modular animation tools, introduced our quest and dialogue systems, developed gaming mechanics and integrated sound effects, to name a few.
Internally, 2023 also brought many changes in our team’s processes. They’ve been quite positive. Still, it’s important to touch base and make sure our workflow functions as intended, and redirect when it doesn’t. With Lucid Tales being a modest indie studio, every team member wears lots of different hats (not literally - although that’s not explicitely discouraged, either). It’s been good to take a step back and see how that worked out in 2023. Hindsight helps to readjust our human resources to the project’s current needs whenever needed.
Big Sally news We are so very pleased to announce that we have secured more funds for Sally’s development! Sally is an ambitious project. We’ve mentioned it on this page before: a successful Kickstarter campaign was not only meant to finance the game in the short-run, but could help us secure additional financing. And that it did! Again, thank you for your support, which made this all possible.
This has wonderful implications for the project. With these resources, we can create a better, more complete experience. More funds means more time to design, implement and fine-tune game mechanics, create environments, fix bugs… We’re no strangers to compromise, but it feels amazing to not have to cut game features we know you’ll enjoy.
Since more content requires more time to implement it, we are pushing back the project’s timeline to reflect the new workload. We understand that delaying the game’s release can feel disappointing to anyone excited to start playing. Believe us - we can’t wait to share Sally with you, either! But the journey on which you will embark will be better for it. We are so excited to implement key features that will add to the experience!
We’re now looking at an alpha access early next year, with a full game release planned for 2026. All Kickstarter physical rewards will follow the new timeline, and therefore be shipped at a later date. This will ensure the artbook correctly reflects the latest additions to the game, for example, and that the logbook is as identical as can be to its in-game copy. Need to change your reward information? No worries. A Kickstarter survey will be sent out before rewards are ready to be distributed. The survey will let you confirm and/or modify your preferred platform for your Sally game key, and update your shipping address, if need be.
More animals! One of the first noticeable difference brought by the extra funding is the addition of more wildlife. If you recall, our Kickstarter page mentioned a few animals which would be present in-game.
We can now comfortably expand that list, and add more life to the floating islands! We’ve gone ahead and started with modeling, rigging and texturing some new species, one of which is a red fox. The fox will be used in a Sally side quest, available at the beginning of the journey. If you’ve been on our Discord server, you might have an inkling of what that entails from previous updates.
Meet the fox!
More modular animation tools We’ve also used our orange friend as a model for our animation processes. After our modular tools have been completed for human characters, we’ve moved on to their wildlife counterpart. We’ve built different building blocks of bone articulations and structures that our animation team can rearrange and reapply to the skeletons of different animals. We can now say that the modular tools needed to animate all four-legged animals have been created!
That all sounds nice, but what does it look like? Glad you asked. Here is a fox, modelized in 3D, complete with bones. An animator would be able to take one of these bones and move it. The program would react exactly how we’ve told it to react. It would move exclusively the selected bone, resulting in something like this:
To avoid having to manually move every bone separately - a tedious process to make convincing animations - devs usually develop inverse kinematics. IKs link together different bones. Think of it like a domino effect: if you pull on someone’s wrist, chances are that their shoulder will also jerk forward. Our animation tools have been coded to do just that. They include multiple bone IKs, complete with different options of credible twists and stretches. Controlling a bone starts a series of events where the position of every other associated bone will follow suit. Look at the difference this makes:
Mouse cursor movement has been sped up.
In just a few clicks, we’ve alluded to the movements of a playful fox!
We are constantly impressed by the quality of animations we get from our animation team. Giving them the tools to come up with dynamic and expressive movements for all living creatures just made sense. It’ll allow for a much easier workflow, and for a much more lively Sally experience!
That’s it for now, folks! Thank you so much for following along, and for your support in this great adventure. The future is looking very bright for Sally. Your devoted Sally team, Lucid Tales
Magic is its own specialization aboard the Sally, which means that making potions will earn you specific experience points. These experience points can then be exchanged for perks and skills, making your character grow from magic apprentice to expert moonweaver.
Not so much. Maybe that’s because that particular crewmate decided to mix flour with more flour, with a side of diced potato. We weren’t exactly expecting a high-end meal from that starchy mess, but it was an important milestone in the grand tapestry of future NPC behaviors.
These will be used to craft more complicated objects. Barrels, for example, will be made with sheets of metal from the foundry, added to wooden planks from the sawmill, assembled in a future woodworking station.
This is an important space, which also happens to take an important amount of space. After all, many Sally upkeeping tasks will be done in the machine room. New crafting workstations are planned to appear in the near future. You can picture this room bustling with crewmates once the ship takes flight! Depending on your own choice of preferred tasks, you might spend a considerate amount of time there yourself.
If you’ve said surprise, anger, and enjoyment, congratulations, you’ve got it!
