Greetings and salutations from myself and Broken Hammer.
Last month we left off with a kind of tease regarding a coming internship program. Now this month I'm happy to make it all even more official as we welcome our new Director of Asian Operations for our new Broken Hammer Asia Unit: Yohana Wandojo.
I met Yohana in November of last year over the internet. At the time she had just returned from Malaysia and was working with her family in Indonesia. She has a talent and a love for languages an a masters in international business. Her interest for much of 2018 was in going to Taiwan and studying Mandarin.
Unfortunately and fortunately, that plan fell through some months ago. It's fortunate because during this year I discussed the idea of getting involved with Broken Hammer. Asian expansion has been a goal of ours for some time from not only a financial aspect but also just overall market size for Visual Novels.
Granted we thought it might happen later down the line, however someone with her caliber of skills and talents is not someone to pass up.
Moving forward, she'll be overseeing this Asian expansion and working directly with our US based management. This job will develop more with time, but right now it is involving an intern program which would benefit artists within Indonesia, as well as other Asian nations where often children are discouraged from art in favor of business and fostering a cog in the machine environment. Hence, there's lots of hammers to be broken!
This was one of our long held goals of providing a launching pad for those who have been hammered down. While I did not foresee it starting in Indonesia, or this soon, this is an opportunity that could not be passed up and it should provide us with the talent boost we've been hungry for since the GoGo campaign ended.
For future localization in Asian markets, she's going to be a dream to have with not only her language skills but also knowledge and contacts in Asia. A Japanese translation of Dust and Air isn't looking too far off now!
In fact, the intern program she's helped establish has already born fruit in two new artists that have joined for a trial month. Should everything work out well, they'll continue with us for up to a year and we'll be featuring their work in coming reports.
As we bring in new talent from the intern program, we'll be targeting some of the other pieces needed. Meaning backgrounds and some of the supporting cast which you would call red shirts. Red shirts get a character model but aren't really part of the main story.
Look for more updates as we go into September as it will be the first full month with our interns on board. As for progress on Dust and Air, it continued during the month as we got this internship program running. However, we don't really have things we could report at this time. Calle is close to being done although Georgy's PC decided to die suddenly before the month ended. He's dealing with that as we move into September.
That said, we'll close there for this report. Be sure to check out Muse Games and their new Hampsterdam kickstarter! It's looking better every day. In fact when we saw the decal they are giving to put on airships, it encouraged us because our decals should have a similar level of detail, if not a little better.
Alright, till next time, see you in the skies!