Sally

Dev Update #29
22 days ago – Tue, Mar 10, 2026 at 12:41:21 PM

Hello Travelers! 

Games by women-led studios 
Happy belated International Women’s Day! Speaking of which, Sally is taking part in Wings’ Women’s Day Sale on Steam. This event features games made by women-lead studios, offering discounts on select titles and showcasing some great demos, including our very own Sally.This might be the occasion to try out or revisit Sally’s teaser demo. If you’ve played it in the early days, you might be happy to see that our character randomizer has since then been replaced with a character creator.

We’re really proud to be a women-led studio, so being a part of this event is quite special! It’s also a great opportunity to collect Steam wishlists from anyone who tries out the demo and enjoys what they see. The more wishlists we can accumulate, the more we can show any potential publisher that the audience is looking forward to Sally.

You can access the event right here until this Sunday, March 15th. Have a look at the great titles featured, this is a quality roster!

In the press 
An article about Lucid Tales' “inclusivity as a fundamental value” has recently been published in Les Affaires, a business-oriented newspaper based in Québec, Canada. The article was published as part of a set of articles on inclusivity in video games, which you can read here. Please note that this content is available in French only.

Now, what’s been happening in the world of Sally?

Bob’s favorite snack: crystals

Remember Bob? He’s the mechanical fish in the center of the machine room. He acts as the Sally’s engine and boiler, turning magic crystals into energy. Without Bob and magic crystals, the Sally can’t fly. Sounds like these gems are an important resource to find, right?

But in the game, you can’t just raid a floating island of all its natural resources. Well- in the demo, you can; they just reappear. That’s convenient, but it doesn’t reflect our design intent. In the full game, resources are meant to be gathered in a way that is balanced and sustainable. Resource management adds a progression dimension to the experience, and guides players towards the two main axis of play: interaction with NPCs and exploration.

If you want a certain resource, you might have to trade for it, do something nice for a crewmate, or explore different sections of a floating island, for example. Beats mining the same ore vein over and over by reloading the island, if you ask us!

Crystals are important, but in the complete game, they’re also uncommon. Fear not, a mythical little creature has appeared to help.

Meet the lucids!

Lucids are mythical creatures hidden in the landscape. You may encounter them as you explore floating islands. In fact, you may find yourself actively looking for them! They know their island by heart, and can locate crystals that are buried underground, full of energy for Bob to use. 

However, lucids are mischevious. They enjoy pointing crewmates in the right direction, but won’t disclose the exact location of the coveted loot. Their code of honor is very clear: if you find them, you get rewarded with a single hint about a crystal’s location.

And thus, on every island is an ongoing treasure hunt. If you want in, you’re going to have to share clues with your fellow crewmates. It’ll take logic, observation and teamwork to figure out the exact location of a crystal!

As with any feature in the game, you are also free to watch your fellow crewmates figure it all out by themselves as you prep a carrot soup. Or tend to the gardens. Or run around on an island. You’re just a kid, after all. Your main mission is having fun.

As you might imagine, lucids come with some fun specific systems and features, which we might share more about in the next update. In the meantime, enjoy the warming rays of spring if you’re a fellow Northern hemisphere dweller. And don’t forget to check out the Women’s Day Sale on Steam! Take care, travelers. 
Your devoted Sally team, 
Lucid Tales

Update #28
3 months ago – Fri, Dec 19, 2025 at 01:19:47 PM

Hello Travelers,

We hope you’ve been doing well. It has been a while since our last development update, and we are so sorry about the delay. As you know, we’ve moved on from monthly updates to allocate all our available resources on securing Sally’s future. It’s been challenging, busy, and stressful, but survival mode has also brought in some interesting ideas and iterations, which we can’t wait to share with you all.

We unfortunately can’t share all the details of what’s been going on with the game since our last update, but all in due time. We promise there are some fun surprises coming up in Sally’s world! We need the time to make them happen. We’re still on the lookout for the right publisher for the game, which is a lenghty process. In the meantime, though, we have added some new features, art, environments, and systems to our build.

Here are some new features we can share at the moment:

Memories
One of the key features of Sally is the fact that characters have memories. Not unlike the movie Inside Out, characters store all kind of information about what happens around them. Some of that information gets tossed to the side, and some of it develops into a core memory. Core memories are important, because they create a baseline for relationships and character growth.

Sally crewmates react to their environment. That means they have to detect when something happens. It also has to apply to characters existing around each other. Our memory system determines which actions are important, and makes sure that any important action performed at a certain distance of a character gets registered.

For example, Elizabeth throwing rocks in an island pond will not register for Sandy, who happends to be in the Sally’s machine room. She will not notice, and therefore not remember that this is something that happened. Seems logical, right? However, if Elizabeth is planting seeds on a farming spot and Sandy is nearby, Sandy will “see” Elizabeth perform that action, and therefore store that information in her memory. Of course, most actions are not really important in the grand scheme of things. This is where core memories come in.

In Sally, memories can be positive, neutral, or negative. If Tommy jumps right besides Santana, Santana may not care. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t remember Tommy jumping, it only means that this action doesn’t trigger any particular kind of reaction. This is the kind of memory that will be tossed, as it doesn’t hold any meaning or weight.

However, if Santana has a personality trait which makes her stressed or anxious when people jump around her, Tommy jumping will affect her negatively. If Tommy keeps jumping around, Santana’s mood will worsen, and that memory will have more chances to stick around. The bigger the impact, the higher the chance that a core memory develops.

The idea is that these core memories will stay in a character’s psyche, affecting their dialogue, their relationships, and their general view of the world. Ask Santana to give something to Tommy, and she might not be so keen to do it. She will, however, remember why she doesn’t want to.

Relationships 
Which brings us to another system: the relationship system. Relationships are a fun and important part of being part of the Sally community. Who doesn’t want to hold a special title in their best friends’ hearts?

Relationships are developed over time, when certain actions performed make characters feel closer together - or the opposite! In our previous example, Tommy and Santana might develop a rivalry if they keep getting on each other’s nerves. They will be less likely to help each other in everyday tasks, and more likely to have their mood affected negatively by their actions.

But Sally is not linear. How could it be, when crewmates are different in every game, and create their own unique dynamics with each other? Growth is possible, and so is change. Over time, the animosity between Tommy and Santana may decrease. With enough time, positive actions, and lack of negative memories, a friendship may even evolve! Core memories will remain, but the negative feelings associated will be overcast by the constant positive actions that have been done since then. Yay for Santana and Tommy.

This is also true for all positive relationships. Your Sally best friend doesn’t need constant reassurance, because that’s not how friendship works. Your best friend status stems from positive memories, and cannot be erased overnight. However, it also doesn’t grant immunity. There’s only so much a person can endure, and that’s true in Sally as well. If you consistently perform actions that your friend hates without taking the time to cater positively to that relationship, you might be demoted, to - gasp! - friends. Or worse, having no special bond at all. Keep it up, and you might even gain a new rival.

The design intent here is to make actions matter, but only in the grand scheme of things. Playing should feel natural. There’s no need to micromanage every little action performed on the Sally to make sure all relationships are perfectly maintained. It is encouraged, however, to get to know your Sally crew and act in the way you would act in a well-functioning society. It’s ok if you prefer some characters over others; that’s life. You won’t be looking to maximize your relationship with everyone to “win” at the game. The Sally is a community, and your objective will be to be part of this community; not control it.

On the future
This will be it for this update: we mostly wanted to share some of new systems available in-game, and give you some development news before the new year. We understand how frustrating it is when a game takes longer than what was initially planned. Financially, it’s been such a difficult year for the gaming industry. We’re not abandoning ship: everything our studio does is geared towards bringing Sally to life as soon as possible. We love and appreciate both our project and its community, and we can’t wait to share some good news as soon as we’re able. Some of these news just need a little more of our time before we can announce them.

As the year comes to a close, we have to acknowledge that 2025 has been a difficult year… In a lot of ways, and for most of our communities. This holiday season, we hope you can hold your loved ones close, even if they happen to be far, and let them know you appreciate them. Here’s to building strong, resilient, and most important of all, kind communities in 2026.

Thank you all for being there. Best wishes, and take care. 
We will be back in Q1 2026 with more development news. 
Your devoted Sally team, 
Lucid Tales

Dev Update #27
10 months ago – Fri, May 23, 2025 at 01:14:16 PM

Hello, Travelers!

We hope these past weeks have been treating you well. We’re back with a little update on Sally.

The Teaser is Back!
We understand that Sally’s development slowing down while our team looks for funding wasn’t the news everyone wanted to hear. And so, we thought it’d be fun to bring back Sally’s playable in the meantime. These past weeks, we have reworked the teaser and added:

• A new settings menu with more options
• PlayStation controller support via Steam Input
• A rewritten UI system
• A crash reporter
• Enhanced performance
• Bug fixes! So many bug fixes!
• And last but certainly not least, the character creator!

Gone are the days of clicking on “randomize” until you get a playable character you like. More importantly, gone are the days of randomizing too fast and losing the perfect character to the hubris of fast clicking (was that just us?). We hope you’ll have fun creating your own Sally crewmate to board the ship!

Of course, we have more options planned to be in the character creation’s final version. This is, much like the demo itself, an imperfect preview. On that note, please remember that the teaser is missing features, options, game mechanics, storylines… The “real” Sally project - the build we’re working on - is more advanced. This is just a little preview of the vibes you can expect from the game, and is meant to be played as such. 

Ready to play? The Sally teaser is available on Steam and, as always, is Steam Deck compatible. Enjoy!

Showcasing Map
In the last updates, we’ve talked about reaction profiles, personality traits, and archetypes. This trio of interconnected systems is paramount for Sally’s experience, as it leads to our main design intent: emergent narrative brought on by unique and diverse NPCs. What does that mean? It means that instead of a pre-established story, you get a journey that is exclusive to your playthrough, your characters, and the unique dynamic between the crewmates aboard your Sally expedition.

Now that we have designed and integrated a reaction profile, 100+ personality traits, and 12 archetypes, it’s time to test if these systems work as intended. To do so, we’ve built a special map where we can present specific items in front of three randomly generated crewmates, and see how they react over time. The crewmates’ current mood and emotional spectrums are visible, letting us know the behind-the-scenes effect of each item on their psyche.

This allows us to see if characters react in ways that make sense - and balance their traits or archetypes accordingly. The mere view of a green bean should not make any crewmate unfathomably angry, or exceedingly euphoric. This map is also useful to make sure the characters reactions are noticeable to the player. Are the personality traits too nuanced? Are they too straightforward? Is the cooldown from their reaction too long? Not long enough? It’s a perfect tool to balance our complex personality systems. In fact, it has already allowed us to rework our personality trait system into a newer, better, easier-to-use new version!

Now that crewmates react to what’s happening around them, it’s time for the next-step: self-awareness.

Self-Awareness
Reacting to things is all fine and dandy, but for these systems to work properly, they also have to influence dialogue. We can’t have a character stomping around in anger and have them say hello with a cheerful “Hi! The Sun is shining and it’s a beautiful day!” They have to know they’re mad, and be able to communicate accordingly.

We’ve now created an exposition feature, which allows characters to tell us about their reactions, and why they’re reacting this way. This feature is connected to the event system (what is happening) and to the personality system (how does that make the character feel). It’s giving us information in real-time, tailored to each crewmate’s experience. While we’re still in the building phase of this feature, we’ve had the characters express themselves in a straightforward manner: “I reacted with [Emotion] because I am a [Trait]”.

In the game, this feature will be layered in into different types of dialogues to sound more natural. Crewmates will speak in a voice that is adapted to their personality and mood, and use different kinds of phrase templates. Thanks to the exposition feature, players will be able to get information about a character’s mood, the events they witnessed, and their own personality - if they’re keen to share, of course! 

This is all we will share for now, travelers. Until next time! We hope you’ll enjoy revisiting the improved Sally teaser.
Your devoted Sally team,
Lucid Tales

Dev Update #26
about 1 year 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
about 1 year 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