Football needs more punching. At least, that’s what the pair of men who make up indie developer Run Games believe.

Veteran game producers Michael Marzola and Nathan Lazur, who’ve worked on games like Star Wars: Battlefront, The Saboteur, and Chrono Resurrection, have left the safe environment of big-name studios to create something on their own. They started Run Games and are working on arcade pigskin game Football Heroes for iOS and Android.

Football Heroes is the smartphone offspring of arcade basketball game NBA Jam, 8-bit beat-em-up Double Dragon, and Baltimore Raven’s linebacker Ray Lewis. Each play starts off like any typical football game (except the teams each only have eight players), but the action quickly regresses into fits of helmet-punching mayhem. Every action awards the heroes of football experience points, which then makes them even better at running, passing, and punching.

Football Heroes also employs a Call of Duty-like perk system that can cause different characters to improve on vastly diverging paths.

Run Games says they’ve focused on making Football Heroes an excellent multiplayer game. It will support both online and local multiplayer.

“EA has killed almost all innovation in sports games, and we are trying to bring back sports games for people who are not simulation buffs,” Marzola told GamesBeat in an email interview.

Of course, since this is 2012, the two-man team at Run Games is looking to bring their game to the masses via social-funding site Kickstarter. The team has reached $5,200 of its $12,000 goal with 21 days to go. Here’s their project video:

As a way to get fans involved in the production process, and to drum up support for the Kickstarter, the team created Run Games Live. It’s a sort of always-on streaming Internet show that will air while the team is developing Football Heroes.

Fans can watch a studio webcam, Lazur’s workstation, or Marzola’s workstation over three simultaneous feeds. Users can log in to the game-streaming website Twitch.tv to chat with the team while they work.