About the game
What Zoo Star is, and roughly how it works.
Zoo Star is a game you play outdoors, with headphones on and your phone in your pocket. You walk a stretch, you hear an animal somewhere around you, you walk towards it and you catch it. Out of the animals you gather, you build a zoo.
Below is how each part works. This is an overview, not a manual. The full rules can be found inside the app itself under How this game works.
Walking and catching
The app counts your metres while you are on the move, on foot or in a wheelchair. Every so often an animal appears. Stand still and nothing happens: the game only moves when you do.
The sound sits where the animal actually is. If it calls from behind and to your left, you turn round and walk there. As you get closer the call grows louder and repeats faster. That is why headphones are not a recommendation but a requirement.
Your zoo and its visitors
What you catch goes into your zoo, and visitors come to see your animals. They pay admission, and that is your steady income. The more animals you have, and the rarer they are, the more people turn up.
Against that stand your costs: staff want a daily wage, buildings need upkeep, and feed can spoil. Your first days are free. Costs only start running once you catch your first animal.
Building
Animals live in enclosures. These enclosures can be upgraded, so that more animals fit in.
There are also barns for your feed, and a section of benches, toilets and the like. Those earn nothing while nobody visits, but once you have visitors they make the trip more pleasant, so people spend more and come back more often.
Everything you build takes ground, and ground is not unlimited, so sometimes you will need to buy more.
Staff and breeding
You can hire people to take work off your hands: keepers, a market master, a dog trainer and so on. They cost a daily wage, but they save you work, and they make mishaps less likely.
Your animals can have young. With a male and a female of the same species you can breed — which is how you get animals without having to leave the house.
Selling and trading
There are three ways to part with an animal. You can sell it outright, you can put it on the marketplace for other players to buy, or you can auction it.
Animals with a task
Some animals have a task. With a pigeon, owl or parrot you can send messages to other players. Furthermore, chickens provide eggs, sheep provide wool, and cows and goats provide milk, which you can harvest and sell.
Expeditions
An expedition is a trip with a small team of players to a region somewhere in the world: the Arctic, the desert, the ocean. There you can catch animals that do not occur at home, for a limited time.
During an expedition, you hear where you are. From the moment you open the expedition screen the surroundings of your trip play underneath it: first an airport hall while the team gathers, then the cabin of the aircraft, and once you arrive the cold, the water or the forest of the region itself. You can talk to your team along the way.
It is a joint effort: every metre anyone covers counts for the whole team, so nobody has to cover the distance alone. Taking part does cost a stake, and you lose part of it if the trip falls apart.
Research
In the research building you work your way through a tree. Each step gives you something permanent: for example, you may build your enclosures higher, or you are able to breed rare species. Each step applies straight away to everything you already own.
Which research projects you can start depends on your zoo's level, so you cannot have it all at once. The tree opens up as your zoo grows.
The same game for everyone
Zoo Star is built to be as inclusive as we can make it, and that works in both directions.
You do not need your eyes. Direction, distance and species are all carried in the sound, so the whole game can be played by ear. It works with VoiceOver, and the in-app explanation is broken into separate paragraphs.
There are also pictures in the app. A compass ring sits around the animal's photo and shrinks as you close in, short animations mark the big moments, and the images scale up with your text size.
The game counts your distance just as well from a wheelchair. That part is being built out right now.
Beyond that, you can keep playing with the screen off, practise indoors without going out, and put your zoo on pause when you are away for a while.
Getting started
Signing in is allowed but not required. The app is in closed testing on iPhone, and in beta on Android (how to join). The public release is on its way.