Welcome to the new and improved Jade Ember Studios website!

Well! What a year.

We helped SkillSaige develop their new, accesible approach to training at SkillSaige.com. And what a project: we got to leverage all our expertise from Unity and character art, to next-gen AI. We’re expecially proud of the work of Sayre Blake, one of our original founding members and the director of Reliquary.

Her domain expertise not just in systems engineering but in classical game AI (she wrote the enemy AI engine in Reliquary!) allowed her to push the SkillSaige team to find novel approaches to AI that are ethical, efficient, and safe (all major passions of hers). Her work landed her an invite from the investor board of SkillSaige to serve as CEO to further her mission to find responsible approaches to AI that empower people instead of replacing them.

But rest assured: she’ll still be contributing regularly to our ongoing tools and projects development. (And back to helm Reliquary when the time to finish it comes).

So what is going on with Reliquary exactly?

Well, needless to say the last few years have been a mess in the industry, and we consider ourselves very fortunate to have survived. Game development is nothing if not unexpected, and this has been no exception. While we spent the last few years meeting with publishers and discussing possible ways forward for the game, we ultimately came away unimpressed with the state of indie publishing as a whole. So we made the hard choice to set a new path forward, and hopefully, in time a better path for us and other studios that might follow along with us.

And that means self-publishing (and self-funding) Reliquary… along with our future projects.

So the good news is: that’s happening soon. Development is starting up again gradually, but three years of gradual slowed development changes a lot on the technical front, and there’s some housekeeping to do first.

We have a few smaller projects we need to complete to ensure the stability of the studio before we can responsibly ramp up production again to full levels: but we’re expect it’s coming very soon.

So what are those projects?

Well, we’re not quite ready to talk about those yet, but stay tuned: we’ve got two exciting things coming very, very soon. As part of our mission to find better ways to empower people to make amazing games (and art) we’re going to be cleaning up and releasing a few of our most valuable studio tools on digital storefronts, starting with a key Unity tool. Expect them to be robust, battle-tested, and affordable!

And the other? Well that one’s a few months further off, but needless to say its something we’ve wanted to do for ages, and an opportunity to see it through recently presented itself: we had to take it!

So stay tuned: exciting things are coming!