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 #13
10 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
Dev Update #12
12 months ago
– Fri, Dec 08, 2023 at 09:21:35 AM
Hello, travelers!
It's the last stretch before a little, well-deserved holiday break. So what has our team been up to these last few weeks?
Conversation gym
Our Sally NPCs are training hard. (Not actual dialogue).
Interactions are a big part of the Sally experience. Instead of scripted dialogues, characters will react to the way you and the rest of their entourage treat them. If you've just turned down their request to switch tasks with you, for example, they might be upset. And so, they will not greet you with the enthusiasm of someone who just got relieved of doing the dishes.
There's lots of work to be done before characters have all the tools needed to react accordingly. These past weeks, we've built a conversation gym to begin testing how these dialogues will play out. Here’s a little insight on our process.
Toying with emotions
First order of business is defining emotions. In game development, everything is a decision. We therefore have to choose which emotions Sally characters can experience, and in which way they will be communicated to the player. We’ve chosen 6 emotions to build Sally’s baseline: Anger, Disgust, Enjoyment, Sadness, Success and Surprise.
Worry not, there will be much more than 6 reactions to display in Sally conversations, as every emotion will be mixed with its context.
Naughty or nice?
There are different types of character interactions, like asking a question or providing information. These give us the contexts in which the characters will display emotions. If a character is saying “no”, what the player sees will be quite different if the character is angry, versus if they’re proud of themselves. That’s because the interaction type (refusal) needs to make sense with the emotion they’re displaying (anger or pride).
Arsène is saying no whilst displaying two different emotions: on the left, he’s feeling angry; on the right, proud.
Of course, this means our animation team is working quite hard on creating all the different emotions and interaction types available in game.
Moods
Whilst emotions are used as reactions to events, moods are the overall feeling of a character. What was their state of mind before their interaction with a player? Sally characters will be affected by what happens to them. How much - if at all - these happenstances actually affect their mood have to be carefully tested out. It wouldn’t feel natural for characters to switch moods every single time something happens. If a character is sad because they lost their favorite plushie, giving them a banana probably won’t make them happy enough to overcome the sadness of their loss. Let’s break down how that example goes:
Mood: Sadness → Interaction: Receives a banana → Reaction: Enjoyment → Mood after the interaction: Sadness.
There’s a delicate balance to find there, and we believe it rests on two key elements: first of all, what was the mood of the character before the event occured? Secondly, how much does the event should weigh in the balance of the character’s overall mood? Finding that sweet spot of believable yet slightly unpredictable is a fun challenge for our designers.
Back to the gym
What is the gym and how are we using it? The conversation gym is a special Sally level created to test our characters’ emotions, moods, interactions, and animation layering. We’ve talked about animation layering before: a process that allows us to mix and match different animations. In short, it means a character can display the animations for “talking”, “blinking”, “breathing”, “asking a question”, and “anger” simultaneously, resulting in a more life-like reaction.
We are currently testing the readability of:
The moods
The emotions
The speed and timing at which the emotions are played
The different animations layering
…As well as the value system for how much an emotion will affect a character’s mood. Once everything feels readable to the untrained eye, we’ll be able to move on to the next stage: testing how a mood flows into an emotional reaction, then back to the mood - and if it makes sense to witness as a player.
Between what we want characters to display and the players’ understanding, so much can be lost in translation. Fine-tuning our work is important, even at this stage. We need a solid base to successfully add nuances. The gym allows us to do just that.
That’s it for now, folks! Please note that our next update will be published in mid-January, as our studio will be closed during the first week of the year to allow our team to rest and recharge. We still have lots of work to do in the meantime, so rest assured will be back with exciting new content to share!
Happy holiday season to everyone who celebrates, and take good care of yourselves. We’ll see you in 2024!
Your devoted Sally team,
Lucid Tales
Dev Update #11
about 1 year ago
– Fri, Nov 03, 2023 at 08:07:52 AM
Hello, travelers!
We hope everyone is having a good pumpkin season! Autumn means harvests, and that’s exactly what we’ll be focusing on in this new update. But first things first…
Last chance for chibisons
The plushie campaign is ending very soon! This is your last chance to participate and get a real-life chibison plushie. Come November 5th, our round friends will be going effectively extinct.
If the campaign is successful, all plushies will be shipped in January, ready to cuddle up during the harshest winter months. They’ll be bearing a special tag of authenticity, which will show how many of these chibisons made it into the world! Plushies are this way.
They grow up so fast
We’re talking about our crops, of course! Farming is an essential part of the Sally experience - although how much time you spend in the gardens will depend on the choices you make in-game. Our art team has been modelizing some new garden plants. They’ll exist in 3 different stages, from little sprouts to complete crops! Soft sparkles will let you know when a plant is ready for harvest.
A Sally garden full of crops at various growing stages
On the importance of food
Growing your own food is a reward in itself, of course. A freshly-harvested carrot can be gifted to your favorite grandma, or used to cook a perfect stew. That being said, eating isn’t just for show in Sally. This past week, our team of designers has been developing the stamina feature.
Just like in real life, doing physical chores in-game will require some amount of energy, which we measure in stamina. You will require fuel if you’re planning on doing cartwheels all around the ship! Your amount of stamina will vary each day, according to what you’ve been eating. Heartier meals will add to your stamina gauge more extensively, allowing you to do lots of physical work in a short period of time. In turn, a handful of berries won’t sustain exhaustive activities for very long. But no worries! No matter the amount of stamina your character has, it will always regenerate with time.
Not a fan of cooking? Don’t forget that you’re sharing this journey with crewmates! Every night, someone onboard will cook a meal for the entire crew. Show some interest in the task, and it might be you. Shun the culinary route, and you’ll be fed by other crewmembers.
Alice asks the player if they’d like to cook again in this snippet of a WIP Sally scene.
Trading system
Another brand-new system has been added to Sally: trading! Trading resources with your crewmates will allow you to have access to more items for your inventory. …Or get the much needed missing sugar for that cake you wanted to bake.
However, don’t count on your crewmates answering your every demand. If you’re offering an unfair exchange of goods, they won’t be participating. Their willingness to trade will also be affected by how they perceive you, and how you’ve treated them in the past. Trading is a privilege, not a right. As with many aspects of Sally, fostering good relationships with your crew will definitely help your cause.
Thank you for following along, travelers! As usual, you’re welcome to join in on the discussion with other Sally enthusiasts in our Discord server. Looking to get your own chibison plushie before time runs out? They’re right this way.
Have a great month of November, everyone! We’ll return with more development news next month.
Your devoted Sally team,
Lucid Tales
Dev Update #10
about 1 year ago
– Thu, Oct 05, 2023 at 08:08:41 AM
Hello, travelers!
Do you remember where you were a year ago? For us, the answer is very simple: eagerly waiting to launch Sally’s Kickstarter, hoping an audience would resonate with the project.
In this update, we’ll look back at the last year of development, and see what has been done since you’ve allowed us to depart on this amazing journey. But first, a little surprise…
You’ve asked for them, now it’s happening
Many of you have been very vocal about one of your real-life Sally needs: chibison plushies. Well, we listened!
We’re really happy to announce that thanks to a partnership with Makeship, a chibison plushie campaign is starting today! We’ve received a first chibison friend as a quality sample, and let us tell you: we couldn’t ask for a better cuddling buddy. They are so very round and soft!
Similarly to Kickstarter, the Makeship campaign will be running for a limited time. If it generates enough interest - a herd of 200 chibisons, to be exact - the plushies will become a reality! Chibison adopters can then expect their fluffy friends to show up at their door this January.
We’re so glad to finally share the news. It was quite difficult not to share our enthusiasm with this community. We hope you’re as excited as we are about them!
From hopeful project to full-fledged game development
You know how that Sally Kickstarter story ends: with your support, the campaign was successfully funded! Let’s recap with a little timeline, shall we?
October 2022 → Sally’s Kickstarter is launched! We presented our project to the world, hoping it would find an audience.
November 2022 → Sally is fully funded on Kickstarter! More than 2000 backers showed faith in the project, and allowed us to embark on this fantastic journey. We even unlocked some exciting stretch goals: the addition of sky sea shanties, and a Nintendo Switch version.
December 2022 - February 2023 → Sally’s animation tools are being reviewed, the Backerkit pre-order store is being set up, and Lucid Tales’ workflow and processes are being improved to prepare for our next big step: full-time Sally game development.
March 2023 → This is the moment our team has been dreaming of: devoting all of Lucid Tales’ time to developing Sally. Up until this point, the team had been busy wrapping up work for a third party. Whilst we were very grateful for that contract - after all, it allowed our young indie studio to stay afloat prior to the Kickstarter funding - we just couldn’t wait to finally work full-time on Sally!
April - June 2023 → It’s new system time! Dialogue system, night and day cycle, floating islands movements, magic portal mechanics, quest system, cooking system… We’re really taking advantage of being able to devote our time to Sally, as lots of new additions are making an appearance in the game. Sound effects are also starting to get implemented.
July 2023 → Lucid Tales moved into its very first physical studio! The option of working in hybrid mode allows all members to choose the environment that best supports their needs. We’ve also updated our equipment, thanks to some additional funding by PME Montréal. Our rendering times have gone down significantly, and our sound designer and composer now has a full-fledged working station. This is a big milestone for all of us!
Did you know? We’re now sharing our offices with another indie game studio from Montréal, the amazing KO_OP! They’ve just launched their new title, Goodbye Volcano High.
August - September 2023 → Bug fixing! While we’re working on adding features, we’re making sure bugs are getting fixed as we go. We’ve also tackled the hefty work of animation layering, which stems from our mood and personality traits system.
October 2023 → Here we are now, with 7 months of full-time game development under our belt. So many new systems have been designed and put in place; new assets have appeared in-game; characters have been re-rigged; animation layering thought out; game mechanics implemented and tested. And of course, a chibison plushie campaign is starting today!
There’s still lots to be done before we can present Sally to the world, of course, but we’re making great progress on all fronts. Everything is running smoothly… not unlike this character’s sprint animation.
Again, thank you so much for your support throughout this great adventure! We wouldn’t be here without your help, and we are so very excited to have you all onboard.
We shall go back to our usual update format next month. In the meantime, if you’re looking for the chibison plushies, they’re right this way!
Your devoted Sally team,
Lucid Tales
Dev Update #9
about 1 year ago
– Sat, Sep 09, 2023 at 07:39:01 AM
Hello travelers,
Can you all smell the faint aroma of pumpkin spice in the distance? September is here, and so is your new Sally dev update!
Time for layers
With autumn right around the corner, it’s time for some good old layering. But in game development, we’re not exactly talking plaid shirts and scarves - although they’re always welcome. We mean animation layering.
For characters to feel lifelike, they need multiple animations. First of all, the basics, which are breathing and blinking. Then, the non-playable character’s (NPC) current activity: walking somewhere, talking to someone, etc. On top of that, they need to react to their surroundings in a way that feels natural. Their head might follow the movement of someone walking by, for example.
But wait, there’s more! Relationships are at the core of Sally’s experience, and thus, NPCs play a very important role. Emotions, personality and mood are all going to affect a character’s reaction the players’ actions… And since they’ll always be different, thanks to unique crewmates in every game and players’ in-game decisions, there’s no scripting those reactions in advance.
Here, the playable character is giving a carrot cake to Max. Max usually enjoys sweets, but because of the playable character’s past behavior, they’re not exactly sure of their intention… Meaning that Max’s reaction is more dubious than positive.
This leaves us with a plethora of animations, which may need to happen simultaneously. If a character stops blinking when they breathe, stops breathing when they walk, and stops walking when they smile, they’ll feel very robotic.
Introducing: layering.
Layering is a process that will allow our animation team to play all the relevant animations of a single character on top of each other, so they act naturally in game. These past weeks, our animation team has been creating basic animations and beginning to test their layering. Our objective: NPCs that feel human and natural, whilst having a game that runs smoothly.
Routine bug fixing
Speaking of running smoothly, we’ve been fixing some bugs and improving some of our basic mechanics. Nothing to be alarmed of, of course. As we add new features to Sally, they’re bound to be a tad clunky before they are fully polished. Some are funnier than others, so as a treat, have a look at our latest fix: the legs inverse kinematics. We wanted our character to go up a staircase like a human would, placing their legs correctly on every step to push their body up the stairs. Let’s just say that in doing that, it got a bit worse before it got better.
Ah, yes. Going up stairs the normal way.
Thankfully, the legs’ kinematics are now fixed!
A victory stance.
Other bug fixes include keyboard and controller controls, the addition of invisible walls, polishing the cooking pot system, fine tuning the camera during dialogues, and more.
New assets
New assets are periodically appearing in Sally, some of them serving our latest developed mechanics. This month, we have a cool new addition: an icebox! (Get it?) This old school refrigerator will keep ingredients and dishes cold, so they don’t spoil in the warm kitchen heat. Neat!
This new asset is fully rigged and interactive. The player can open the icebox doors, and select items inside to add to their inventory.
That’s it for now, travelers! Stay tuned for next month’s update, where we’ll have some very exciting news to share. Until then, take care and safe travels!
