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The timeline of Afro-Ninja from then till now

Year: 2008



2008 was a pretty big year for Afro-Ninja Productions. By now I was fully established as a business. I had a business name, tax id number, and I purchased some accounting software to make sure everything was tracked properly. In a sense, 'Afro-Ninja Productions' and 'Shawn Tanner' became two separate entities. With everything official now, I was free to act a little more like an actual business. This meant purchasing extra computer equipment, traveling to more events, and writing off certain expenses as 'business-related.' Pretty exciting stuff.

The year started off slow, since I was spending so much time to try and finish my biggest game yet, Territory WAR Online. However I did find some extra time to help Zombie-Pimp work on his Pico Day submission, House of 100 Cats. It went on to win first place for Pico Day 2008.

After months of nonstop work Territory WAR Online finally hit the net, and it was a relief. It was a huge hit upon release, and is still going strong well into 2009.

As Territory WAR neared completion I picked up on another long-forgotten project called Escape From Camp Crystal Lake. It was intended to be the sequel to 2003's Escape from Elm Street, but fell in and out of production over the years. Joe(SleazeRocker) and I decided it was finally time to put the game to rest, so over the summer we cleaned up the old version and finished it for good.

At this point in my life I decided I needed some kind of change, so I looked into going back to school. Art school, specifically. I've always had an interest in both art and computers/programming, so I thought maybe art school would fill in some missing gaps for me. I was also interested in moving out of Ohio, so I checked out some schools in Philly. I chose Philly because it was the city I was most familiar with outside of home, it was big, and NG wasn't too far away. I ended up choosing University of the Arts on downtown Broad street.

Over the course of the year I made two trips to Philly to check out different schools. On my later trip, in October, I met up with Luis and Swain and we had a mini-meet with the NG staff. The result of that trip was the Newgrounds Office Adventure v 1.3.

Also during this year, in between Territory War and Crystal Lake, I got started on a site redesign. Although the current site functioned perfectly well, it was showing its age. The code was very sloppy and inconsistent, as was the design itself. I knew that I could better monetize the traffic that I was already getting, so it would be a waste to not try and improve it. With two big games out of the way, I headed into 2009 with another two big goals- redesign my site one more time, and make a smooth transition to Philadelphia life.