Unsigned – Legendary battles with ancient, mighty cows in Moo Lander

This article is a part of MCV/DEVELOP’s Unsigned, bringing a spotlight to unsigned indie games in partnership with Unity.

An action-adventure RPG where you have legendary battles with ancient, mighty cows for the most precious resource – the milk!

Dimitar Popov

Developer: The Sixth Hammer

Location: Plovdiv, Bulgaria

Team size: A core team of 6 people working full-time and around 10 more working remotely during the different parts of the development.

Progress: Demo (getting close to alpha)

Contact details: Dimitar Popov, popov@thesixthhammer.com

Tell us about your game and why you decided to develop it?

With Moo Lander, we are aiming at creating an immersive fantasy alien world with a unique mix of epic and funny moments. We have tаken significant time handcrafting our environments and composing the right music for them. During the years, we have prototyped, tested and validated dozens of different skills and hundreds of enemies and mechanics leaving and polishing the ones we’ve had most fun with.

The glorious cow battles and their lethal AI were of course a top priority for us. We’ve had the idea for a long time and have always been fans of fantasy adventure 2D games, but the final push to start the development came after we’ve played through Ori and the Blind Forest back in 2015 – the game has been a real inspiration for all of us.

Who do you think the audience is?

Our environments are handcrafted with lots of detail and vibrant colors for the casual gamers and children while offering deep challenges, character development and rich storyline to the hardcore gamers. We also have legenDairy fast-paced couch multiplayer with different PvP and PvE modes. You can even play as a cow.

What experience does the team have?

We have passionate programmers, artists and musicians in our core team and we’ve had people from Europe, Asia and the Americas working on the game at the various stages. Our studio has worked on various mobile games for clients in the past. But this is our most ambitious project so far and working on it has been an incredible experience for all of us at The Sixth Hammer.

Why did you decide to use Unity to create this game?

When we started developing 4 years ago we determined Unity has the most of the 2D features that we would need. We also migrated Unity version once during development to get the new graphics effects and amazing 2D lightning. We are currently pushing the engine to the limits each day and have developed our own Unity solutions for various non-trivial problems a project of this scope requires.

The Moo Lander team

How long will it likely take to complete?

Moo Lander has been in development for around 4 years (gathering the right people in our team took 1 year, because of the very specific artistic style of the game). Now we see the finish line with only months remaining for completing the PC version.

What kind of support are you looking for?

We are mostly in need of a publisher or a marketing partner as this is extremely important for getting the game to reach its target audience.

About Chris Wallace

Chris is a freelancer writer and was MCV/DEVELOP's staff writer from November 2019 until May 2022. He joined the team after graduating from Cardiff University with a Master's degree in Magazine Journalism. He can be found on Twitter at @wallacec42, where he mostly explores his obsession with the Life is Strange series, for which he refuses to apologise.

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