What is Exploding Cow?

Exploding Cow is a small and newly started game company from Denmark. We are 5 students who participated in a game education seperate from our studies, called DADIU (Danish Academy for Digital Interactive Entertainment). Here the game Blendimals was formed in March 2011 and Exploding Cow was then the name of our team of 12 people. (You can find the original Blendimals game and play it for free in the prototype section of this site.)

Having an urge to create Blendimals for its destined platform, iPad, 5 of us decided to keep working on the project in our spare time. Therefore Exploding Cow has become a company – so far developing and publishing the iOS game Blendimals.

If you need to contact us we can be reached here: contact@blendimals.com

Exploding Cow team members

Completely alphabetic – because we’re so democratic..!

 

Dennis Nielsen – game designer/sound

Student at the National Film School of Denmark / Animation Director.

Born in ’84 – I grew up in the middle of the big video game revolution when pixels turned to polygons. I have pressed play on tape, inserted disc 11, been dropped off at toy stores to play ‘Tekken 2’ for hours and praised the Game Gods when the Xbox 360 was launched.

I love video games and for me it’s still better than Christmas when the next big thing is just about to hit the stores.

When it comes to making games I’m all about old school. As a big fan of Amiga 600 I’m hoping to bring back that very special Amiga-feel to the modern game market with crazy universes, great atmosphere and solid gameplay. Blendimals is the first to-be-launched game I’ve worked on and I’m very excited about it.

Ditte Rønhøj Frostholm – producer

I study Interactive Digital Media at Aalborg University, finishing my Master’s in September 2011.

I’m the producer/project manager at Exploding Cow, handling time schedule, project scope, PR, company stuff and generally interfering with everybody’s business.

I like games of pretty much every kind: Computer games, board games, sports games, you name it. So it’s really quite fitting to be working with games – and anyway without games what would we be spending all our time on? We’d probably have to do something useful.. (urgh!)

I’m an avid sports fan, especially following the local soccer team of my home town, Esbjerg fB. Normally sports present a good topic of conversation, but that’s all wasted on the Exploding Cow team, where I seems to be the only one interested. Perhaps making ‘Blendimals Sports’ will make them see reason?

 

 

Ida Dirksen – art director

I’m a student at The Danish Designing School in Copenhagen. I finish in 2012 with a Cand. Design degree.

I was born in Belgium and lived there till I was 4 years old. I grew up with a father that is a big fan of the computer and through him I learned how to build, work and play the computer. At the time I turned 18 my parents went to live in Paris for 5 years. After finishing high school I went to live with them for half a year to learn French and get to know the city.

I’ve always been fond of drawing and love Disney and cartoons in general. I play a bit of guitar and paint in my spare time.

Like Dennis I hope to catch the good old classic Amiga-game-feeling with Blendimals and hopefully make some people laugh and remember that time.

Jacob Sloth Laursen – programmer/game designer

Hi! I am Jacob, also called Jacob II – named because I was the second “Jacob/Jakob” to enter the room on the first team meeting! Though I started out as fulltime programmer, I am currently working as half game designer and half programmer. It is quite nice to be working on both aspects of the development.

I grew up in a hippie-like home with no electronic equipment at all! (At least that is how I remember it). Only playing with my LEGO and the chickens outside, I was very excited when we got a television and later when I got my own computer!

I quickly learned a lot about computers just by trial and error and made my first game in QBasic. It was a very silly game called Herlock Sholmes, a game where you have to infiltrate a strange house, and where very strange (stupid) things happen.

Besides the typical hardware you got, I own a Nintendo NES, and Duck Hunt is frequently being played to great satisfaction. Today, I actually think that I play more normal board games than computer games, but for my favorite video games it must be Thief, Mafia and Gothic 2.

 

Jakob Svane Knudsen – programmer

My interests in gaming is by no means restricted to electronic media. I’m an avid tabletop miniature collector, painter and gamer, enjoy a good (real) board game and for as long as I can remember, I have tried to combine my drive to create things with my enjoyment of games, but it was only when I started dabbling with programming in Python and the Pygame SDL-bindings for it that something playable emerged. Unfortunately, I don’t have any of the very unfinished, barely-more-than-a-control-scheme games I made back then. I’m lousy at backup.

After churning my way through a Higher Technical Exam (something like college, I think), I went to Aalborg University to study Computer Science and now I’m trying to make a living making games. Unsurprisingly, in the Blendimals team I take on the role of a programmer.