A few months back, the Minister was faced by the vast amount of art assets that needed to be created for Shiftling to be completed, and we started exploring the option of bringing other artists on board. While most of the slack has been picked up by the arrival of Pedro and Sharlyn focusing exclusively on art for the foreseeable future, thanks to the blog post we were introduced to a lot of awesome people, including our newest Sprocketeer, Raphael. In addition to Raph, we got into contact with a number of talented artists from Kota Kinabalu and West Malaysia, either in response to the post or through Tristan, Leon or Minho’s own outreach.

Among them was Randy Robin Galiban, who while working in Kuala Lumpur, was excited enough by the prospect of a game being made in his hometown, that he took the time to work on some Shiftling-themed pieces. Ranbin, or Randize, has been an active artist for a while, as you can see by visiting his deviantART page. He does a lot of matte painting, and we were really stoked to open our inboxes and and see the gift he had made for Sprocketpunk.

Included in the batch were several concept art images based on the Tagal family cottage from Book I of Shiftling, giving Randal’s take on one of the early scenes in the game. Minho always has art on his mind, and he was possibly the most excited to see how other people rendered Shiftling characters and settings.

Also, based on the movie-inspired poster circulating around HobbyCon last year, he produced his own take of the Hunter.

If you like Randy’s work, you should drop by his Facebook page or stalk him on deviantART.

Before joining forces with Leon and starting up a game studio here in Kota Kinabalu, some of Sprocketpunk’s founding members were kicking it Gangnam style in Korea. Well, sort of. Sprocketeers John and Tristan were a stone’s throw from Gangnam Station in Nonhyeon-dong and a short bus ride from the Seoul city center, where they were instructors for an English institute, since renamed Wall Street English. In Jongno, “Bell Road” if you’re the translating type, they happened upon another Sprocketeer, Minho “The Minister” Kim, who while filling up his deviantART page was busy honing his English at WSE Korea.

Venturing around Bukit Bintang in Kuala Lumpur just last month, John happened upon a WSE center there and got a bit nostalgic for the old days in Seoul. Not long after, Sam Wigginton contacted him asking if he and Tristan would be up for doing a short podcast for WSE Korea, talking a bit about their transition from life in Korea to working on Shiftling in Malaysia. Go ahead and give it a listen if you fancy, just remember it was edited with intermediate English learners in mind. Also, it was our first attempt at recording ourselves. That much will probably be obvious. The voice at the beginning is Sam.

We’re going to try  to make the Sprockcast a thing, obviously with a game dev, life in Borneo and gaming slant. If there is anything you’d like us to talk about, or burning Shiftling questions you’d like to to have answered, let us know on Facebook or through the contact form on the site and we’d be glad to talk about them.

Since the start of Chinese New Year, the Sprocketpunk office, like most of Kota Kinabalu has been a whirlwind of activity. We had a new face join our team in Raphael, who just got back in town from finishing up a year course at Vancouver Film School in game design. We really liked the cut of his jib, and his love affair with Unity, and it’s already hard to imagine how we ever got by without him. There may be some confusion, as his disposition is more Donatello/Leonardo-hybrid than Raphael, for those who might be thinking in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle terms.

Tristan headed off for a week in Melbourne, and has had nothing but good things to say about Josh and Bryan’s old stomping grounds upon returning. We’re really hoping to get back there for PAX Australia this Fall. Or Spring? But then there’s not really seasons here in Borneo. Let’s call it “late October, early November” for the sake of clarity. John was off to Kuala Lumpur to expand his passport and waistline through visits to the US Embassy and Carl’s Jr. respectively.

We also had a visitor around and about, as Minho’s brother was in town from Korea for the week. The Minister took the opportunity to revisit some cultural attractions, and get reacquainted with some traditional clothing and local ethnic groups, which should pay off when he starts working on more character attire and areas inspired by them soon.

The final day of the Chinese New Year celebration, Chap Go Meh,  happens to fall on Valentine’s Day this year, forcing some of us to make that hard decision between family and significant others. Or for the single foreigners here, the even tougher decision between Tiger and Heineken.

For those of us familiar with the holiday from Korea, we hadn’t really expected to see Lion Dancers beating well lit drums at local businesses everyday or be invited to countless dinner parties complete with red envelopes laced with money. Tonight Sharlyn will be brining the foreign Sprocketeers to her place for our last shot at ang pow and free booze for a while. It was good while it lasted.

The holiday has been fun, but we’re looking forward to getting back to normal: having no social life and working on Shiftling round the clock. More about that soon. We’re still at the usual haunts, posting and chirping about Shiftling, but we’ve decided to dust off the ol’ Tumblr as well. If you’re interested, check us out at any of those.

Sharlyn likes to surprise people. Her previous body of work in the field includes making dolls, plastering a Sprocketpunk logo on the wall of our office, painting a commemorative drawing for our one-year anniversary, making us all (much needed) coasters and even hand making a Pokémon-style trading cards for Tristan’s birthday. She even got herself a hanbok and showed up on Day #1 of HobbyCon in traditional Korean attire, especially for our homesick Korean colleagues, Minho and Snow. That’s how the Sharmander rolls.

Her most elaborate surprise to-date came when she emerged on Day #2 of last December’s HobbyCon dressed as Nadine from Shiftling. While the rest of us focused on board games, messing around with the Oculus rift and debating which size burrito to buy for lunch, she managed to sneak off and return dressed as the heroine Minho and Tristan have been bringing to life for the past year. Apparently Sharlyn only got the urge to cosplay Nadine a week out from HobbyCon, leaving her precious little time to pull it off. Despite having never cosplayed before, she was able to pull a few threads and get the whole ensemble to come together in time for the event.

How it went down It’s no secret that Nadine’s clothes are inspired by the traditional clothing of the indigenous people’s of Malaysian Borneo. Her attire is definitely distinct in its own right, but if you happened to have a have a Kadazan-Dusun “moludu” hanging around in your closet, you’d have a good head start on cosplaying Nadine. Sharlyn, while Sabahan herself, is ethnically Chinese, so her closet had been hitherto moludu-less. Luckily, a friend of hers from college had been doing fashion design for over a decade, and her specialty conveniently is Kadazan-Dusun traditional clothing. She gave Nancy Jollok a call.

Nadine’s Brightwood Costume Having arranged to meet “Kak Nancy” as Sharlyn calls her (“Kak” being “big sister,” like onesan in Japanese or eonni in Korean. tl;dr No relation.), Sharlyn was ready to talk moludu tops and kickstart her cosplay. Traditional clothing being varied from area to area, even village to village, the first piece Nancy presented Sharlyn with was a version from Kota Maruda. While no doubt beautiful, this wouldn’t help her bring Nadine to life. Sharlyn was sad. Nadine’s attire with the black and gold edges as she would later discover is more like those from the Penampang area. She was a bit taken aback to learn that the sleeveless design of Nadine’s costume was meant for unmarried young women, and surprised that Minho had incorporated that into his character design all those months ago. She was also bummed that Nancy didn’t have the necessary top design on hand, with HobbyCon only a few days out.

Thankfully, Nancy is a legend. After seeing the character design of Nadine from Brightwood, her home area and the launchpad for the journey that players embark on through the world of Shiftling, she said she would need only two days to produce the top. Score. With that part of the costume done, Sharlyn could focus on the boots, brown tights, the mark covering Nadine’s hand and the Tagal family necklace. Tattoo/Mark It would have been a total surprise for everyone on our team, if only Sharlyn had physically been capable of tattooing her own right hand. Not being ambidextrous, and not keen on drawing the tattoo while holding eyeliner in her mouth, she enlisted the help of the Minister, our Art Director Minho. He’s pretty good at drawing Nadine’s tattoo.

Tagal Necklace This was one of the hardest piece to make. Extracting the design from Minho’s art, measuring the exact size and printing it out was a piece of cake. The hard part was finding the perfect sized metal base for the pendant and making sure the final outcome would be waterproof (the design is printed on paper after all). Everything was DIY. It took about a good 4 hours to make sure every seam is perfectly sealed and protected from water and an entire day for the glue and resin to dry completely.

While Sharlyn is going to be hella busy working on motion comics and and other in-game art assets going forward, we hope she finds time to continue cosplaying and  help the rest of the gang get stuck in.

For most of us, business trips aren’t really the norm. We leave those to Leon whenever possible. Still, when a lovely island off the coast of Borneo known for its comically low alcohol prices is involved, taking the whole team is warranted. Labuan is sometimes called the “Pearl of Borneo,” and while that may be a bit grandiose for an island that is best known for cheap booze and is uncannily shaped like a Reaper from Mass Effect, the experience was a good one. Were it not for the brutally early flight, and the uphill battle that was trying to get ourselves back to Kota Kinabalu after the airline cancelled our return, it would have been even better.

The trip wasn’t all about taking advantage of duty free goodies and wrangling with Malaysian Airline subsidiary MASWings for hours, though. We were invited to tour the campus at the Labuan School of Informatic Science, usually “SSIL,” from the Malay name, a Universiti Malaysia Sabah (UMS) branch. Leon made the acquaintance of Dr. Zamhar Ismail recently at a talk sponsored by the Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC). Chances for future collaboration seemed abundant, and at the very least we had good company to talk games and game development with right in our backyard.

SSIL has been training its students in everything from animation to ZBrush, and even has made several courses specific to games available. The school’s worked hard to get games noticed as a technical and creative art in Malaysia, and while they were forced to use “euphemisms” to avoid four-letter words like “game.” Fortunately, the times they are a changing and newer programs in the country are able to attach “game” to their program names while still being treated as the legitimate disciplines they are.  The faculty at SSIL liked what we’re doing as East Malaysia’s first MSC-status company, and extended the offer to tour their campus, and talk supporting each other in the future. MSC stands for “Multimedia Super Corridor,”and probably sounded a lot cooler in the 1990s when it was established, but the 3-letter acronym serves as basically a license that nearly 4,000 multimedia companies based in Kuala Lumpur have attained over the years. We’re the first from East Malaysia, but surely not the last.

Tristan, Leon and Dr. Zam gave presentations to some of the faculty that hung around over the holiday, and Pedro hinted that asking him to wait more than an hour without a smoke is bang out of order. He protested by rolling a cigarette during the end of Tristan’s speech. We’re interested to see how we’re able to work together in the future. There are a lot of possibilities, but more site visits, presentations and workshops could happen. While perhaps a few UMS interns may be joining the Sprocketeer ranks in the future.