Working at Ranj we were mostly trying to invent new or better ways to make learning a playful experience. But there were some projects where we would try our hands on a web game with the soul purpose of pure entertainment.
Back then we developed Holy Cow for a new German online gaming platform. Stepping out of our very serious role we tried to think of a silly idea that would be approachable enough for a casual audience. Soooo, the main story of Holy Cow reads a bit like this:
For the last 300 years a race called The Lactorians have been lying dormant on our planet. Their fleet of motherships ran out of fuel and unknowingly to the people of earth, crashed on our planet. The surviving ships buried and disguised themselves and have been secretly scanning earth for a natural resource potent enough to replenish their lost fuel supplies. Centuries of Lactorian experiments have resulted in a shocking conclusion. The only source that actually works is milk.
Only raw, freshly extracted cow milk can be refined to produce the delicate fuel needed to leave this planet. Smaller recon ships have now been sent out to, covertly as possible, retrieve as much cows as they can. Time is of the essence, the earths people are getting stronger every day.
Nothing earth shattering but boy did we have a lot of fun just working on ideas that would fit the easy to learn hard to master principle! We started with the basic mechanic of flying, shooting and abducting and after that started adding more difficult enemies and various other weapon and defense upgrades.
Just like 99% of the other webgames in that era it was entirely developed in Flash, consisting mostly out of spritesheets so we could do fancy special effects in After Effects and escape the vector look that most Flash games are known for. In the end the game was only fluidly playable on the more high end PC’s which was a bit of a problem but boy did it look good for a webgame!
