Women's Arena Football Windows game

Faction 504 is excited to announce Women's Arena Football 2025, an American football game featuring women as primary players in the male-dominated sport. It's also a work-in-progress! Let's ramble.

So, why?

It's good music on the practice field and locker room talk. It's team-building and beers chugged after a touchdown. The coaches come in all shapes, sizes and have all the attitude. These women play hard and work harder to win. That is what this is all about. Ask any football player from Pop Warner to the NFL and it's why they do it.

Women's Arena Football is a a simulation football game developed by a game studio with aspirations for an office on Bourbon Street. Which has less to do with tits than it does the energy that's contagious. We work in New Orleans where the weather is warm and people love this sport because it's a reason to get together. Long Sundays capped by a football game and good food. Very American, or whatever. We love it here, it's the south.

What I'm saying is that we like to focus on the fun and often finding it in the simple. Focusing on what's right in front of us. That's why we created this studio. And we love doing things that no one else does because that's fun, we love doing it. That's why we're doing this.

Now let's talk about the facts!

We Are Indie AF. Which means that while this game will be a simulation football game there will be some arcade elements where absolutely necessary. We want to make a simulation football game. But we know our limitations! Tell your local publisher to come find us.

We know football. And sports in general, huge fans. Lots of discovery happening on this one though, just because of how little known a lot of women's leagues have historically been. The hope is to introduce the history and style of all this to new audiences, even if embellished for a video game.

We play football games. We know what's missing, I mean, wow, if you know too. And a lot of it seems obvious. Most of it had been there before. There's a lot that we want to do and most devs will agree that's always the case in the beginning. We all know that these things don't always pan out. So we thought we'd get into what we want to focus on the most in Women's Arena Football:

Intuitive AI During Engagements

The obvious path is not always the right path. Sometimes a smaller player knows the bigger one has weak knees or bad balance. Maybe the player just prefers to take hits instead of running out of bounds. Some prefer to stick with the middle of the field. We plan to allow the game AI to function as multiple agents learning with each and every snap.

This is so that over time your players will develop unique play styles. Even if they arrived on your squad playing a different kind of way.

Simulation Physics (working on it)

Well we want realistic graphics but that's nothing when things just don't make sense. Fluidity of movement and real hard hits are happening. It's not football without either and if you have ever seen any women's American football teams play you'll know that some of those collisions make the other league look soft.

In addition, there's some serious variety in playstyle. We want to showcase this and the only way to do that is with a lot of time and effort. It's one thing to get access to motion capture materials and another to continue refining that basis to portray a multitude of players. Who would naturally come from so many different backgrounds and play differently. We will be looking for feedback every step of the way.

Off-Field Team Interaction

We are not sure why so many sports games adopt RPG mechanics yet allow almost every other interaction with the game world to remain so stale. It's like, how many texts messages say the same thing each season? Regardless of player circumstance?

WAF25 uses Unreal Engine 5 to render our vision but a proprietary back-end will power as much player logic as possible. It focuses on individual NPC interactions. Each of whom share their own views and opinions on certain in-game matters. In the context to WAF25, you will be able to talk to your team mates, coaches and select fans about other players, the team, the league, the last game, next season, last season and so on.

This implies down-time, yeah. But football has a of of that. We always thought it would be cool to actually allow players to walk the sidelines and chop it up in those moments. Maybe you made a big play and wanted to know if that rumor about your butter fingers is starting to flip into something positive.

Get hurt, get cut, miss a season? Tryout next year. It's all part of the experience.

More than One Uniform

And for the obvious. There will be multiple uniform types reflecting the standards of various real life leagues. All of whom we would love to work with. But time will tell! Women's Arena Football primarily uses a common type of uniform popularized by more recent leagues but there is plenty of variety for us to keep things interesting.

If you are interested in our project and would like to participate in early testing click here to join Arena Access! We hope to see you on the field.