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 #23
6 days 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
about 1 month 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
Dev Update #21
2 months ago
– Thu, Sep 19, 2024 at 12:33:01 PM
Hello, Travelers!
Gamescom 2024 The team is back from Gamescom, and what a great experience it’s been! Thank you to everyone who came to say hi at our humble little booth. Watching people of all ages enjoy the Sally demo and its new character creator was an honor and a privilege. Meeting Sally enthusiasts really put a smile to our faces! The game had a really good reception with the crowd, but also with industry professionals - and while we’re all strong believers in the project, seeing that our enthusiasm is shared is an extra level of amazing.
Moments like these melt our hearts!
We’ve since now returned to our home in Québec, our traveling suitcases full of good memories, optimism, and new contacts.
Events and Emotional Reactions But enough about our gooey feelings: how is the game coming along? Very well, thank you. These last weeks, new systems have been added to Sally. You see, the Sally demo was a preview - it didn’t include all the systems meant to be part of the experience. Now that the June edition of the Steam Next Fest is over, we’re focusing on creating the first real horizontal slice of Sally. An unfinished version of the game, that includes everything that will be part of the game loop. That’s a lot of interconnected systems!
First on the list is the event subsystem. We want our characters to react to their environment; what’s happening in their environment therefore has to register. All kinds of events will create different types of stimuli: for example, Woody the sawmill is quite noisy, and creates, well, sound!
A character uses Woody the sawmill in our debug tool; the sawmill creates a stimuli sound.
You might be familiar with the question: if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? And thus, if no one is around to hear the sawmill, does it still affect its environment? Not so much. For events to have any kind of pull, they have to be noticed by a character living aboard the Sally. And not all events are created equal, either. That’s where personality and moods come into play.
Every time an event is perceived by a character, whether or not they’ll react to it depends on a lot of variables. Is this event something that matters to the character? Do they have personality traits making this event feel bigger or smaller than it is? After all, a sound-adverse person will not be affected by Woody’s noisy saws the same way than, say, a character who thrives in loud environments. That’s how personality traits affect the influence of different types of stimuli.
Then come in moods. If you’re in a good mood, a stimuli that would otherwise bother you can go unnoticed. On the contrary, a bad mood can inflate the dramatic effect of a stimuli, making it feel much worse than it would be otherwise. That’s how the event, personality and mood systems are interconnected, making sure that all crewmates aboard the Sally react in ways that are realistic.
Let’s say that Amy drops a spoon on the kitchen floor, making a tiny sound. Amy is in a good mood, and it’s a very small event: nothing that would warrant an emotional reaction. But Ben is also in the kitchen, and Ben is in a terrible mood. They got up on the wrong side of the bed, they’re frustrated because their pie didn’t come out right, they hate noisy environments and, quite frankly, they’re not too keen on Amy, either. They remember how her clumsiness have affected them in the past. All of these circumstances would bubble up inside of Ben, modifying the severity of the event, and making them react in anger.
And this, travelers, is why someone might snap when they hear a single spoon be dropped on the floor. The event itself isn’t that big of a deal; maybe it was the straw that broke the camel’s back; or the spoon that further broke the crewmate’s emotional threshold.
But we can’t have characters always snapping at everyone because they’re in a horrible mood, can we? Maybe Ben just needed to chill for a bit. Well… we agree. Crewmates must have ways to regulate themselves, and make sure that they put themselves in situations where they feel relaxed and content. That’s where our next point comes into play.
Take it Easy, Kid If you’ve played the Sally demo, you might have noticed that the activities were quite focused on work. Cooking, creating potions, using the sawmill or the foundry, farming… But Sally isn’t all about working! Crewmates are unique individuals, and just like us, they have their own preferences in the type of activities they prefer to be doing. Some will love to work towards a certain goal, some will prefer playing games, and some will enjoy… well, just chilling.
These past weeks, our animation team has been working on lounging animations. It’s important to relax and take it all in, sometimes! More than just an idle, lounging will offer some perks to players and crewmates alike. Lounging will, amongst other things, lower a character’s stress, bringing back their negative emotions to their neutral value. To make things interesting, some lounging activities will include player inputs, resulting in game mechanics that are both refreshing and relaxing.
Who’s part of the “Sitting in a chair correctly” club? Not Lenny. But that doesn’t stop him from enjoying a relaxing pause in his busy life.
By lounging, crewmates regulate their emotional state, making sure that they won’t get bothered by the smallest of stimuli. In that sense, Sally isn’t so different than real life. Don’t forget to take care of yourselves, travelers, it’s a stressful world out there! We will be back next month with more development news. Your devoted Sally team, Lucid Tales
Dev Update #20
3 months ago
– Thu, Aug 15, 2024 at 11:16:12 AM
Hello, Travelers!
This month, we’ll also take part in some travelling, as most of our Montréal-based team will be going to…
Gamescom 2024 We’ll be at Gamescom! A Lucid Tales group will be at the biggest video games convention in Cologne, Germany, from August 21st to 25th. You can meet our team in Exposition Hall 10.2 at Koelnmesse Hall, in the Indies of the Americas booth.
Come say hi and try out the Sally demo! We might even have some surprises in store for you.
Character Creator This past month, we’ve been working on our character creator. If you’ve played the demo during the Steam Next Fest, you might remember that a randomizer was put in place, letting you choose a playable character from randomly-generated candidates. Well, randomly-generated no more! Our character creator is now functional, sound effects and music included.
More content is to be added as development continues, of course. For example, you can expect more choices of clothing items, and a name and pronouns slot added. Some pre-existing assets, like baby hair, also haven't been integrated yet - so there will definitely be a lot of customization options available.
Good news: anyone coming to the Gamescom convention will be able to experience the character creator, as it’s now been added to the demo playable on-site. We’re excited to see who you create as you embark on the Sally!
Floating islands It’s no secret that floating islands are an important part of the Sally experience: that’s where you’ll be able to forage and collect natural resources, as well as artefacts. Floating islands come in different sizes and biomes, and just like NPCs, they’re also partly randomly generated! These past weeks, we’ve been testing the waters - and earth, and air - and putting in place the building blocks of our island generation system.
The islands being randomly generated adds to the replayability of Sally. There’s an extra layer of that sweet, sweet feeling of discovery that’s added in an experience where the environments are different in every game file. For this to be an exciting feature, though, it has to be done right. Let’s not have trees floating in the air, snowmen in summer biomes, and foxes spawning in the middle of lakes.
We can already hear the enthusiastic agents of chaos reading this, going “Oh, but that would be funny”. You’re not wrong, but that’s not exactly Sally’s design intent! Don’t worry, randomly generated content means you’ll get plenty of surprising discoveries - with no foxes harmed in the process. Don’t forget that Sally’s world is a magical one, and magic can change the odds, and shape, and maybe even colors of what you can find on floating islands!
But for now, let’s focus on our building blocks. We’ve defined different categories of elements that can be generated in lieu of each other. A willow tree, for example, could be replaced by a an oak tree; they’re both in the “tree” category. Once those different categories were created and all the different landscape elements of Sally categorized, we used an existing floating island to run some tests. All elements on the island were tagged according to their category, then swapped with different elements. This allowed us to see which categories needed to be reworked, which needed to be added, merged, or split, and what types of exception rules need to be put in place to create cohesive, exciting biomes.
The Sally docks on an island with a rocky landscape, which indicates there might be a cave to explore.
That’s all we’ll share for now, travelers! We’ll be back next month for some more dev updates; in the meantime, we’ll hopefully meet some of you at the Indies of the Americas booth in Gamescom. Don’t be shy and come say hi if you can! Your devoted Sally team, Lucid Tales
Dev Update #19
4 months ago
– Fri, Jul 19, 2024 at 07:09:21 AM
Hello Travelers,
This past month has been a special one, since we put out a Sally demo as part of the Steam Next Fest! Since the event has now ended, the demo is no longer available to play. But good news: for anyone who missed out, you can experience it vicariously through the playthroughs of content creators, like this one from Ash's Cozy Corner.
Demo updates It’s been a busy but very wholesome experience to watch players engage with Sally for the very first time. Of course, our team has been hard at work for the duration of the Steam Next Fest. Throughout the event, we’ve added content to ensure player experience was as positive as possible. That includes graphic settings, in-game content, bug fixes, and even little secrets to discover.
An interactable sign appeared near the foundry to guide players on how to use the station.
Crewmate interactions This demo was just a teaser, not to be confused with the final product that Sally is meant to be. As Sally is centered on community, we definitely wanted to give players a little taste of what’s to come early on in the process. But even at this phase, it has helped us test some features in their early stages, and test our current tools - and their limitations. One of the key features tested were the crewmate interactions.
As you know, crewmates change in every playthrough, and aren’t bound to a schedule. They’re programmed differently: meant to act and react according to their personality and the events taking place in their lives. In the demo, we’ve alluded to that. The crew was different every time the demo was played, and had different archetypes (instead of the full-fledged personality traits they’re meant to get later on). Every crew member chose to do tasks as they pleased. Some would decide to cook a stew; others would use the sawmill; some crewmates decided to just walk around the Sally. As such, we’ve been able to see how it would feel to be in a flying ship with a crew that does its own thing, in a matter of speaking. Crewmates were also able to tell the player about their current goal, thanks to emergent dialogue that adapts to both their plans and their personality.
Isse and Zhar both need mushrooms to attain their goal - but their approach is quite different.
Since we’re early in the development of their artificial intelligence, the crewmates were limited in their interactions. Gift giving, item trading, helping each other with tasks, exchanging information and bonding with other characters are all actions they’ll be able to perform in the future.
This gameplay experience helped us see which tools we still need to develop to make interactions smooth, realistic and appealing. As such, the days post-demo have been spent researching tools and comparing notes on the lessons learned along the way. We’re buzzing with ideas to make all emergent interactions truly engaging!
On other demo limitations There are so many things we wish we could have added to the demo, but since it was an early in-production build, we had to be patient. Of course, the final version of Sally will have full character customization options and a stacking inventory with more than 10 slots. You won’t be limited to just a few rooms from the Sally, either. The limitations linked to this demo exercice were numerous, but they did help us with long-term project management. Just like with crewmate interactions, every feature present was added in an early stage. Making that stage playable made it that much clearer what we did and didn’t want for the future of Sally, and how to approach those changes. We won’t lie, travelers: it’s a really exciting time for Sally game development!
25k Steam Wishlists! Want more good news? Thanks to our participation in the Wholesome Direct and the Steam Next Fest, Sally has now surpassed 25 000 wishlists on Steam! That is a great milestone for our indie game, and one that will definitely help development in the long run. We’re really grateful to everyone who made this possible.
We’ll see you next month for more development news, travelers. Safe travels! Your devoted Sally team, Lucid Tales
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.
