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 #26
25 days ago
– Tue, Feb 25, 2025 at 10:31:03 AM
Hello, Travelers,
This update is one we’ve been hoping not to have to write. Unfortunately, due to forces out of our control, we have to put Sally’s development on hiatus. Nothing is wrong with the project; in fact, the game has never looked better. Up until very recently, development was going at a remarkable pace, and we were making strides in so many exciting parts of the Sally experience.
What is happening? The current landscape of video games funding is a difficult one, leading to negative repercussions across the board. These past months, we’ve been trying to fund the next step of Sally’s development. Meetings, presentations, applications; we’ve been busy. Unfortunately, opportunities are few and far between. Despite lots of promising developments with investors and publishers alike, we haven’t yet found the right partner to invest in Sally’s future at this time. Our self-funding options fell through, and without capital, we’re left at a standstill. We currently do not have the funds to sustain Sally’s development until its release.
What now? For the foreseeable future, our studio is putting its time and energy into its survival. We’re going back to our roots and looking for contract work, amongst other mitigation avenues. Our goal is to work our way into financial stability, so we can go back to sustaining Sally’s development.
In the meantime, Sally will become a side-project. Its release timeline is up in the air right now, as we are not in a position to know when development might be able to resume. The monthly dev updates will also be put on pause to allow our team members to focus their energy where it will best serve the studio and Sally in the long-term. However, we will keep using this channel and our Discord server to communicate any relevant news regarding our situation, so you will be kept in the loop.
We understand this news might come as a shock to everyone. We’re truly sorry for the change in timeline brought by this difficult situation. Please know that we are grateful for every bit of support we have gotten from every one of you. We fully realize the economical struggles of our times, and we do not take your support lightly.
We also realize that the state of the world feels uncertain and scary, right now. We’ve always wanted Sally to feel like a warm hug in the midst of life’s challenges. Our situation is certainly sensitive, but our objective hasn’t changed. More than anything, we hope we can soon go back to dedicating ourselves to creating a world full of wonder and kindness for you to explore. We are doing everything we can to make that happen. Thank you for your understanding. As always, please take good care of yourselves. Your devoted Sally team, Lucid Tales
Dev Update #25
2 months ago
– Tue, Jan 21, 2025 at 09:16:36 AM
Hello, Travelers,
And welcome back to the Sally meeting room, 2025 edition.This update will be quite design-heavy, so bear with us as you learn about…
Archetypes Last time, we talked about the creation of our 140 personality traits. As a reminder, there are two big categories of personality traits. They can be features that modify a crewmate’s reaction to a certain stimuli. For example, feeling enjoyment when eating something really spicy, instead of surprise. They can also be behavior modifiers, like a crewmate who prefers sprinting to walking, and therefore sprints almost everywhere.
But we can’t just slap any personality trait on a random crewmate and call it a day - that would open the door to the creation of clunky characters. For example: crewmates who have differents personality traits that contradict themselve. Crewmates who have many traits associated with the same action, therefore giving mixed signals to the player. Crewmates that are just a bundle of negative personality traits. We don’t want that. We needed a system.
Introducing: Archetypes. Archetypes are a predefined selection of different personality traits, all rolled up in one neat little package: a Sally personality. Currently, there are 12 different archetypes implemented in the game. Every archetype has positive traits, neutral traits, and negative traits, which makes for balanced personalities. There’s no Negative Nancy aboard the Sally! Or, well, if Nancy is very prone to pouting, she would at least love sunny days and gardening, and be a very loyal friend. Just an example.
On Avoiding Patterns Archetypes come with their own set of possible problems, though. We want crewmates to have their own personalities, and not just be a version of SallyArchetype1, or SallyArchetype5. They have to feel different to players, and not be easily categorized. We tackle this challenge in three different ways.
The first is, quite simply, the sheer amount of different archetypes. Our 12 testing-phase archetypes are already up and running aboard the ship. 13 more are currently designed, and we’re planning on adding twice as many. With a total of 50 archetypes, personalities aboard the Sally will be diverse!
Our second solution is to make sure that characters sharing the same archetype don’t have the same personality. All archetypes have personality traits set in stone. However, some personality traits are also floaters: they will be associated to characters at random. Preferences and tastes are a good example of floating traits. While Tom and Jerry share an archetype and both love running, Tom enjoys night time, and Jerry is a very big fan of cheese.
Finally, let’s not forget that most personality traits modify the basic emotional response of characters. Down the line, we will add different basic reaction profiles to different characters. Let’s go back to Tom and Jerry, who share an archetype and both love running. If Tom’s basic reaction profile is more sedentary than Jerry’s, then despite Jerry’s love of running, Tom will not run as much as Jerry does - and Jerry might forever outrun Tom. Or so the story goes.
Here is a visual representation of how different floater traits, archetypes, and basic reaction profiles will result in different crewmates.Of course, archetypes include a lot more personality traits than the two pictured!
The Personality System Endgame Basic reaction profiles, personality traits, archetypes: what are they all for? Our objective is simple. We want our Sally characters to be diverse and feel complex, nuanced, whilst also being believable. In playing Sally, you don’t need to know about archetypes. Normally, you shouldn’t even be able to tell them apart.
Crewmate generation is random in every game, and thus, you won’t know how many of the different archetypes you’ve come across as a player. All that will be important is that Benjji enjoys sunny days outside, and Olga might prefer curling up in a corner of the library with a warm cup of tea - and, oh, Izabel just boarded the ship. Why don’t you try and meet them, see if you have anything in common? Maybe you can help each other out in the future. That’s the real endgame.
Well, travelers, this is already a lengthy update, so we shall stop here for now. We hope every one of you is safe and sound. As always, please take good care of yourselves. Your devoted Sally team, Lucid Tales
Dev Update #24
3 months ago
– Fri, Dec 20, 2024 at 10:31:51 AM
Hello, Travelers!
Your December update is here. We hope you have a warm beverage nearby, and a few minutes to spare!
Forageable Flowers
It might be winter in our part of the hemisphere, but it sure feels like it’s spring in Sally! These past weeks, our art team has modelized an array of forageable plants that you’ll find in the game. Here are the 2D icons of the plants that needed a 3D version.
Different items to forage in Sally
And here is the result!All flowers exist in two different forms : the plant version and the item version. The plant will be forageable on floating islands, and the item will be what characters hold in their hand once they’ve foraged the plant.
If you look closely at this screenshot, you might notice that two of these plants were not depicted as 2D icons in the first image. That’s because they’re new additions. Can you guess what they are?
Look at the those great green leaves in the back of the screenshot, with colorful stems. That’s addition number one. From there, hop to two plants to the right: that’s addition number two.
If you said rhubarb and dandelion, congratulations, you know your Sally plants!
Sweet, Sour, Salty, Bitter or Umami?
These past weeks, we’ve taken every item present in Sally, and associated them with their correct stimuli. This ensures that our characters will be able to react to said stimuli. For example, a golden ingot is now shiny and heavy; a flower smells nice; animal fur is soft, and sometimes stinky.
When it comes to food and ingredients, those stimuli include the 5 basic tastes: sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami. They’re all part of Sally’s cooking system, and will come into play for crewmate’s preferences. But we noticed something amiss. Our offer of forageable ingredients was slightly lacking in two of those categories: sourness and bitterness.
That’s why rhubarb and dandelions were added to our forageing roster. Rhubarb is sour, and dandelions are bitter. Both are easily found in North America. Since Sally’s biomes are made to mimic North America’s flora and fauna, the addition of these two plants made sense. Most of our team has grown up eating rhubarb stalks dipped in sugar! And don’t shun those dandelions, kids: they’re an excellent source of potassium.
That’s just one way our numerous systems influences what’s present in the game. In the case of food, balancing the offer of garden consumables with forageables and the different tastes associated with every ingredient is a fun exercise. One that lead us to this recipe:Strawberry rhubarb pie, anyone?
Personality System
As we’ve mentioned last month, the next step in our group of interconnected systems is the Personality system. If you’ve been reading our last updates, you know that we have an Event system, which creates stimuli from what happens in-game, and a Reaction system, which makes our characters react in different ways to the stimuli received. The Personality system then acts as a modifier of the Reaction system, changing basic reactions into taylored responses, giving everyone on board more - well, personality.
The first step of this system is creating personality traits.
Personality Traits
Personality traits are usually features that modify a crewmate’s reaction to a certain stimuli. Let’s see an example.
Jamie and Laurie are working in the machine room. They successfully use the foundry to create a gold ingot. Jamie doesn’t have a personality trait associated with the event of crafting a gold ingot. Therefore, he feels successful, which is the basic emotion felt by a character who crafts an item. Laurie has the Machinist personality trait; working in the machine room brings her extra happiness. She’ll therefore feel enjoyment, rather than only success, as she crafts her shiny gold ingot.
Skylar is nearby. Skylar loves shiny things. They’ll react with surprise at the gold ingots crafted by Jamie and Laurie, since they’re shiny.
Not all personality traits are linked to emotional reactions. Some are crafted around behavior. Characters with the Playful personality trait will choose to play games more often than their fellow crewmates. Laidback crewmates will perform less tasks than their peers during the day; Multitaskers, on the other hand, will do more.
In total, 140 personality traits have been designed. They span over 22 different categories: action, locomotion, social, feelings, time or sound, to name a few. Of these 140 traits, more than 110 are implemented in game and functional! Lots of possibilities for NPC generation. But there’s more than personality traits to our Personality system… More on that front next month.
Happy Holidays, everyone. Take good care of yourselves and your loved ones! Your devoted Sally team, Lucid Tales
Dev Update #23
4 months ago
– Fri, Nov 15, 2024 at 10:49:08 AM
Hello, Travelers,
November is here, and so is your monthly Sally update. Here’s what the team worked on these past weeks.
Playtime System All work and no play doesn’t make for the coziest of days. Play is important! It strenghtens bonds, improves moods, and even gets those creative juices flowing. A number of different games will be available for the crew aboard the Sally, and thus, playing needs its own system. These past weeks, that system has been designed and put into place. Our game designers and programmers will now be free to create the first iterations of games to be enjoyed by everyone onboard.
The first game has already been implemented, and it’s a classic: Hide and Seek.
Hide and Seek Hide and Seek can be started by the player or by a crewmate themself. The initiator will bring up the idea in conversation, and once the other participant accepts, it’s time to play! The first person will go hide somewhere (for now, on the Sally) and the other has to find them. Stumped looking for a crewmate? You can always ask someone on board, who might give you directions. Careful, now, because pranksters might also give you false directions.As the hiding player, you can go anywhere on the Sally. You can of course change hiding spots as you wish during the game, but you’ll have to be subtle about it: if you’re spotted, game is over.
At this stage, we’ve implemented one-on-one hide and seek. In further versions of this system, more crewmates will be able to join in on the fun! They will also be able to play on their own, without your input. As always, the Sally is meant to be bustling with life and interactions.
Event System Back in September, we created the first iteration of the event system. We made sure that the game was set up so events could be created, and characters could react accordingly. After all, in Sally’s definition, an event is something that makes characters react. These past weeks, we’ve worked on the categorization of events, along with curating these experiences.
A good and organized system means a better workflow. Our events’ nomenclature is self explanatory. This reduces the margin of error when programming the events, and ensures we’re not forgetting any steps of our game mechanics. This organized system won’t let us mistake the effects of eating a raw onion with the effect of carrying one in our inventory, despite both sharing some of the same pungent effects. It will also make the creation of relevant events to future added content more efficient. After all, we still have lots of recipes, workstations, activities and character movements to add to the Sally experience!
As we’re writing these lines, events of multiple types have been created and are entering the testing phase. Actions, Crafting, Cooking, Environment, Farming, Foraging, Movement, Inventory: there’s a lot happening in our characters’ lives. Using the cooking pot, for example, now gives off different aromas: food, of course, but also a light hint of wood and smoke, since the food is being cooked on an open fire. There’s a quiet gurgling sound as the ingredients heat up. Using the cooking pot can also elicit certain feelings in the crewmates around the kitchen. Coziness, as they know a good comforting meal is on its way. A sense of wonder, too, as they wait to see what’s cooking.
For everything happening, we add the relevant stimuli to the experience. How these stimuli affect the game depends on the reaction they elicit in diverse characters; that is a different step in itself.
Basic Reactions The good news is that we’ve also completed that step! For every stimulus type created in Sally so far, we’ve added a reaction (or a lack thereof). For example, something stinky will provoke a reaction of disgust, whilst something mysterious will provoke a reaction of surprise. In associating all stimuli to a typical reaction, we’ve created our very own creature: the most basic Sally crewmate who ever lived.
This is Alex. Alex likes what most people like, and dislikes what most people dislike. Thank you, Alex, for being the wonderfully average hero we needed.
Which is not very interesting, is it? But it’s a necessary step. Now that events create stimuli and that stimuli evokes a response, we’re so much closer to Sally’s promise of narrative emergence. Gameplay is affected by every crewmates’ actions and reactions, making Sally a playground of emergent interactions - and giving the game infinite replayability.
But we can’t do that with an army of Alex’es. Characters need individuality to act and react in different ways. This is when our personality system will come into play, which you’ll probably hear about in next month’s update. In the meantime, take care, everyone! Your devoted Sally team, Lucid Tales
Dev Update #22
5 months ago
– Wed, Oct 16, 2024 at 02:21:34 PM
Hello, Travelers!
Pumpkin season is upon us, and we hope you’re celebrating with your favorite cozy beverage. These past weeks has seen its lot of administrative work. Managing an indie studio and worker coop has its fair share of paperwork - and then some. Thankfully, we’re also making strides in our current objective, which is creating Sally’s horizontal slice: a version of the game which includes all Sally systems. Here’s a quick rundown of the latest developments.
Island Generating System Work is underway in our island generating system! The first step of categorizing elements that can be generated on islands had already been done; since then, we’ve been focussing on creating a tool to test out these elements. Category by category, we’re making sure every instance spawns correctly, takes the right amount of space, and appears in its correct form. For example, a pine tree has to appear with its roots solidly grounded in the earth, can be spawned in three different sizes, and, of course, has to be part of the “tree” category.
Traveling Players can now access the world map, select a destination, and make the Sally travel to that destination. Islands visited through traveling can either be revisited through the world map, or accessed through the magic portal for more convenience.
A crewmate investigating a floating island from the Sally’s balcony.
Sally: Under Construction Remember these signs?The Sally is a big ship, and many areas were blocked off in our little playable teaser. These past weeks, work has been done on these unfinished parts of the ship. That includes drafting up plans, modelizing spaces, figuring out the flow, furnishing the spaces, and creating and texturing new objects. Areas currently under construction include the dormitory, the common room, the observatory, and little nooks and crannies we’ll keep secret for the moment.
Options & Settings Our new options and settings menu has also been implemented, complete with a new user interface. It includes some of the basics, like the sensitivity of the camera on both the X and Y axis, to make looking around more intuned to players’ preferences. Some of the game’s accessibility features, such as changing the text’s scale, color, and border, are also on their way. These features will include a color blind mode with different color presets, and a custom strength scale to fine-tune color correction preferences and needs.
NP-let me-C Now that our NPCs have the beginning of an inner life… Well, we want in! Wouldn’t you love to know at a single glance what a person’s goal is, or who they’re friends with? That’s exactly what our newest NPC tool does. Selecting an NPC now lets us know who they are, who they’re friends with, what their current objective is, what they’re currently planning, and more. This is a very useful tool that will be expanded in the future to help us test multiple aspects of gameplay.
For now, though, we do enjoy knowing that the reason Calvin is sprinting through the Sally is because the call to make pumpkin-based soup is Just That Strong. Very in season, Calvin. Travelers, if you needed a sign to go make some comforting soup, here it is. Have a cozy pumpkin season, everyone! We’ll be back next month with more updates. Your devoted Sally team, Lucid Tales
This update will be quite design-heavy, so bear with us as you learn about…
Of course, archetypes include a lot more personality traits than the two pictured!
All flowers exist in two different forms : the plant version and the item version. The plant will be forageable on floating islands, and the item will be what characters hold in their hand once they’ve foraged the plant.
Strawberry rhubarb pie, anyone?
As the hiding player, you can go anywhere on the Sally. You can of course change hiding spots as you wish during the game, but you’ll have to be subtle about it: if you’re spotted, game is over.
The Sally is a big ship, and many areas were blocked off in our little playable teaser. These past weeks, work has been done on these unfinished parts of the ship. That includes drafting up plans, modelizing spaces, figuring out the flow, furnishing the spaces, and creating and texturing new objects. Areas currently under construction include the dormitory, the common room, the observatory, and little nooks and crannies we’ll keep secret for the moment.