Animal Soccer
Concept
Pick your team from the whole animal kingdom. Pay them in food.
A soccer game where every player is an animal, and its body is its playbook. The giraffe keeps goal with its neck, the elephant kicks hardest, and the frog launches the ball with its tongue. Recruit across beaches, jungles, deserts and ice, and pay your stars in food.
Background
Size, shape and species decide everything. Height and mass are separate stats, so the tallest player and the hardest kicker are never the same animal. Every species has a move nobody else can make: the snake coils around the ball and springs it out as a shot, and the elephant rolls it with its trunk, legal only in goal, where trunks count as hands. Tails are fair game anywhere.
Every pitch plays differently. Snow kills the roll, cracked desert keeps the ball running like a street, and ice sends players down and gets them hurt. A knock you play through; a bad one sits a player for the rest of the match, or slows them if you leave them on. Formats run from full eleven-a-side to seven-a-side and small street games.
Off the pitch it is a journey. You recruit by exploring and by playing pickup games, then inviting the best of the other side. Contracts are paid in food, and a hungry star says no if you can't feed them. At the end of the road are three lions who have run the game for as long as anyone remembers, and a sport that should belong to everyone.
Where it stands
The roster, the signature moves, the pitches and the story arc are designed, and a street match is playable on the studio's shared pitch engine, the one that already runs the soccer in Human Value Index: small sides, street rules, body stats for mass, height and reach, grass and ice underfoot, and touch controls made for a phone. A pipeline turns modelled animals into pixel sprites; the first four species are through it.
What's next
Signature moves and more species through the pipeline, a second pitch that plays differently, then the journey around the matches.