Football Drama Press Kit

open-lab.com/games/footballdrama

Factsheet

Developer:
Open Lab Games and Demigiant
Based in Florence, Italy

Release date:
September 18th, 2019

Languages:
English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Portuguese

Stores:
Steam (Win, Mac), Apple Store (iPhone, iPad), Google Play.

Website:
open-lab.com/games/footballdrama

Press Contact:
games@open-lab.com

Business Contact:
games@open-lab.com

Social:
Twitter
Discord

Address:
Open Lab - Games
Via Venezia 18b
50121 Florence
Italy

Phone:
+39 0555522779

Description and Review guide

view the Review Guide

Football Drama - "Every goal has a story."

In Football Drama, you're Rocco Galliano, the existentially troubled manager of a struggling football team. Train players, survive the drama, choose your own narrative, and play turn-based football matches via tactical cards and hard choices. If you avoid the axe you could win the championship, understand what is football, retire at the French Riviera, end up in jail, or who knows what else!

First release platforms: Steam, Itch.io, IOS, Android. In English, Italian and French.

Genres: management, story-rich, turn-based, choices-matter, soccer, sports, card-game, existentialist.

More...

Extended Description

You are Rocco Galliano, the Marseillaise new manager of Calchester Assembled Football Club.

A foggy evening in Calchester Joy City, chatting with your cat about your dramatic comeback as a football manager.
After the abrupt ending of your coaching career seven years ago, the hysterical attention of the press quickly faded. But struggling results by Calchester FC convinced Boris Aluminovitch, its billionaire president, to axe the previous beleaguered manager and give you a new chance.
Will your raucous shouts from the bench change the fate of the matches? Will you find wiseness and karma leadership by consulting with the Book of Changes? Will your shady past reach back to you and make you crumble?
There is a slim chance that you can make it through a full season. Corruption, crime, drugs and romance are all paths that you may take - for the better or worse.
This is the only football game where you may lose the championship and win the game!

Key features

- Interactive narrative with meaningful and game-changing choices
- Karma or chaos: life choices, managing choices
- Turn-based match play with live-action animations
- 18 dramatic weeks of generated championship where you can be fired at any time
- Deck-building mechanics determined by life choices and game results
- Ridiculous cards about the craziest aspects of today's football
- Complete illustrated log of each of your matches
- Silly main commentator with his obligatory colourful sidekick
- Replayable - every championship is unique, several different endings
- Nicely designed user interface by Pino Panzarella
- Stunning illustrated cards and characters by Daniele Giardini "Demigiant"
- Share your wins with friends and enemies

Why another game on football?
Football Drama was started after discovering and exploring the richness and quality of the literature about football. Novelists and poets like Pasolini, Galeano, Soriano, Hornby, Saba, Handke, Wenders have written about football and its evocative and poetic power. Same in movies, with fringe and beautiful works like The Lost World Cup or Wender's The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick.
This naturally leads to the question: why people love football so much?
So we started designing a new, unique game around football, as we believe games can be a wonderful media for storytelling.

Behind the scenes: "Why People Love And Hate Football"

In this video Football Drama's game designer Pietro Polsinelli and Konstantinos Dimopoulos (@gnomeslair)talk about the extensive background research for Football Drama:


Videos

Football Drama: Every Goal Has A Story (gameplay) YouTube

Football Drama: a managerial, narrative and weird football game YouTube


Images

download all screenshots & photos as .zip (30MB)
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There are many more images available for Football Drama, but these are the ones we felt would be most useful to you. If you have specific requests, please do contact us!


download logo files as .zip (1MB)
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Selected Articles

  • "Soccer Management Sim Is Surprisingly Artsy"
    - Riley MacLeod, kotaku.com
  • "Football Drama is a story-driven Football Manager"
    - Fraser Brown, pcgamer.com
  • "Football Drama is a management game with personality"
    - Sin Vega, rockpapershotgun.com
  • "Football Drama - Recensione"
    - Gabriele Barducci, thegamesmachine.it
  • "Football Drama: Dentro del deporte rey (Spanish)"
    - Javier Alemán, niveloculto.com
  • "Football Drama: l’epica calcistica e la cultura popolare (Italian)"
    - Davide Mancini, IVIPRO
  • "FOOTBALL DRAMA is a Different Kind of Soccer Game"
    - Tommy Williams, Geektyrant
  • "Narrative game Football Drama makes the beautiful game actually beautiful"
    - Kate Fanthorpe, indiegamewebsite.com
  • "Perché Football Drama è interessante"
    - Edoardo Ullo, ilvideogioco.com
  • "The Indie News Roundup: Football Drama, Bear with Me, and Mutant Year Zero"
    - John Reetun, Ggsgamer
  • "Football Drama: finalmente un gioco di calcio che mi piace"
    - Francesco "TheLawyer" Alteri, gameromancer.com
  • "Under The Radar Games That You Should Play!"
    gameskeys.net
  • "Underrated Strategy Games To Play"
    gameskeys.net

Open Lab Games
Open Lab Games is the main producer of Football Drama, check its applied games here open-lab.com.

Demigiant
Demigiant develops games and technologies for developers, check it here demigiant.com.


Team

Pietro Polsinelli (Open Lab Games)
Concept, game design, overall coding, narrative (plot and writing).

Pino Panzarella (Open Lab Games)
UI design, overall graphic design, animations, audio, video.

Matteo Bicocchi (Open Lab Games)
Pair coding, match emulator, design, web dev.

Daniele Giardini (Demigiant)
Illustration, universal guru consulting, narrative tools.

Marta Ascari (La Tarma)
Music.