Ninja Robot Dinosaur

Shellrazer, the game I collaborated on with Slick Entertainment and Maple Syrup Sound, launched a week ago today.

The launch has gone great. Over the weekend, on the Paid App charts, we hit #2 in Canada, #3 in Australia and #8 in the USA. We also did great in France, Germany and many other countries.

The reviews has also been outstanding. We’ve scored a couple of perfect 5/5′s and many 4.5/5 reviews.

Overall, the whole experience has been amazing and overwhelming.

Here’s the trailer for Shellrazer. If you haven’t checked it out, you can play it on iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch here.

I’m putting on a huge sale of Ninja Robot Dinosaur t-shirts until June 2nd.

All t-shirts, all designs in all sizes are $9.99.

As I’ve never put the shirts on sale before, you might be wondering why I’m doing this now?

A t-shirt for the Horcrux Hipsters out there.

Back in university (a long, long time ago), a friend of mine, also named Shane, introduced me to The Invisibles. The book opened my eyes to the adventures of transvestite shamans, time travelling psychotic psychics and surreal conspiracies.

To say the book changed my life would be an understatement. At the end of the series, the writer of The Invisibles, Grant Morrison, wrote himself into the comic and dared the reader to do something worth doing. Within months, I had quit my job at Electronic Arts and moved to Victoria to produce BMX videos and run a bike company.

He tells strange stories with iconic characters. He’s helped Batman, Superman, X-Men and the Justice League over the years, each time he presented a wonderfully unusual adventure with mainstream characters and has rocketed the book to the top of the best seller list. Mainstream success with unusual and distinctive stories. Amazing.

On sale until June 2nd

Grant Morrison, simply put, is my hero.

Now it’s confession time.

In the past year, I have had to wipe man-tears from my eyes in a comic shop on three separate occasions.

The man behind these tears is Jonathan Hickman, the book was Fantastic Four. Never in my life have I been a Fantastic Four fan, but Hickman’s work is tremendously imaginative, yet intimately personal. It strikes a chord with me like no other comic has before.

Hickman is the most interesting writer in comics right now. And he’s not even from the UK.

A group of event organizers are putting on MorrisonCon. A small event (attendance is capped at 1000) where fans, freaks and weirdos go to Las Vegas to spend three days with Morrison, Hickman and a few other guests.

The purpose is to make something closer and more intimate than a fan packed floor of a comiccon. Instead of capturing everything under the sun, Morrison is bringing together a small group of like minded creators to make something unique.

Morrison, in his usual manner, is promising a life changing experience. It’s an experience I’d very much like to be a part of.

Which brings me to the t-shirt sale. With family obligations and the budget of an indie developer, there isn’t a lot of cash hanging around for me to fly to Vegas and have a life changing experience. But I do have a few boxes full of nerdy t-shirts.

Back at the start of 2010, when I started on this weird little Ninja Robot Dinosaur indie adventure, my goal was simple: Make the games I want to make and do them solo.

Solo. For a guy who has spent 15 years making games ‘the traditional corporate way’, this may seem unusual, but it was a big part of the goal.

I like working by myself. I enjoy tackling the design, programming and art problems that come with making a game. When I’m sitting at my desk, staring at [code/a level/a sprite animation] trying to figure out how to make it work better, I am in the zone. It's my happy place.

Nick Waanders, founder of Slick Entertainment (n+ and Scrap Metal on XBLA) is an indie developer in Vancouver. We've peripherally known each other for years (he left Relic the week after I joined) and became friends a couple of years ago.

The first time Nick asked me to work with him, I said no. In hindsight, I was probably quite rude about it, but, you know - I wanted to work solo.

Nick was persistent. He asked me a few more times, throwing the suggestion out whenever we got together. Then he suggested a week long jam, we got together over lunch, threw some ideas around, but nothing really came of it.

When the Global Game Jam came around, Nick and I were on the same team and throughout the weekend, Nick kept planting the seed. Even when he wasn't saying the words, I could hear him whispering in my ear, like Vader to Luke: "Join me Shane." At one point, I swore he told me he was my father. Whispering-in-my-head-Nick denies he said anything of the sort.

Then came Shellrazer.

Vancouver has a monthly indie developer meet-up called Full Indie. Nick and his partner in crime, Jesse the Drawbarian, were showing people things on their phones. People were excited. I was curious.

Nick came up to me and showed me some of the visual design that Jesse had put together and Nick looked at me and asked one more time: "Do you want in on this?".

There wasn't a second of hesitation.

"Dude. It's a giant turtle, with guns, who shoots things and they blow up. Let's do this. I'm in."

My earliest memory is sitting on my grandmothers floor, drawing comics like the one on the NRDland.com header. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a deep and engrossing love affair with art.

Despite this lifelong love affair, for most of my life, I’ve been a terrible artist. I sincerely feel that my ‘art award’ in high school was an act of charity on behalf of the instructor and the passing grades in my art classes in university were due to my participation and attendance more than the actual results.

Now, at 37, I’m finally (FINALLY) moving towards my goals with art.

The funny thing is, all I did was draw more and draw more deliberately.

I’ve always drawn, but drawing with a deliberate intent is something that I started about a year ago. Finding a problem with my work and attacking it instead of finding work arounds.

I was struggling with crouching poses, so I drew 50 crouched skeletons in my sketchbook. They were loose drawings, some were studies from reference, others were freehand, but it was enough to get me to a level of confidence with the pose itself.

And as an artist, it’s nice to have that confidence going into a piece of work.