PAN Studio complete Kickstarter
funding for Run An Empire, announce
Android version
London based experience design studio passes £15,000 Kickstarter target and confirm they will work on both iPhone and Android versions of Run An Empire
PAN Studio’s Kickstarter campaign to develop Run An Empire, a game that combines the strategic thinking of digital and board games with real world physical actions that that make sports so much fun, has today reached its target of £15,000 seven days ahead of deadline.
More than 1000 people have backed Run An Empire, which has been the third most popular project on Kickstarter in Europe throughout its run. Overjoyed at the response, Ben Barker and Sam Hill at PAN Studio, based in Shoreditch, have further announced that they will now develop a version of Run An Empire for Android as well as the initially planned iPhone version. They say,
“We’ve been in ludicrously good spirits this morning and thrilled at the response we’ve had so far. We can’t wait to get going and make Run An Empire a reality. We were inspired by all the strategy games we love to play, like Civilisation and Risk, and wanted to create something that has that same strategic elements but is also rooted in the real world and takes advantage of social and interactive gaming afforded by the smartphone.”
Early Kickstarter backers will now have the opportunity to join the beta testing, while the app will be developed over the coming months before being launched fully towards the end of the year.
Using a player’s smartphone’s GPS Run An Empire will record a runner’s route and time. Players compete against each other to capture territory in their real local environment. While running is encouraged, players by no means have to be gifted athletes, as a slower but more determined walker can beat a faster, but more opportunistic runner.
This is a first Kickstarter campaign for PAN Studio, but the team are well known for other real world games experiences, having won the inaugural Playable City Award in 2013 produced by Watershed with their project Hello Lamp Post, which has since been nominated for this year’s Design of the Year Award at the London Design Museum.
For more information about Run An Empire, visit: runanempire.com.
About PAN Studio
Founded by two Goldsmiths graduates Ben Barker and Sam Hill in 2012; PAN is a studio of designers, play-makers and developers based in Shoreditch, London. We design games, new kinds of experiences, and other playful systems across digital and physical environments.
We have created playful, location-based mechanics before – last summer we were awarded the commission to build Hello Lamp Post for the Playable City Award (and have since been nominated for this year’s Design of the Year Award at the London Design Museum) – a city-wide experience that allowed people in Bristol, UK, to share stories and observations with each other via intermediary street furniture (benches, bus stops, letterboxes and parking meters etc). We built a rudimentary proof of concept to find out how the mechanic feels to play, we’ve done some tabletop and street-level testing and we have been investigating scalability to be sure that the game can work on a global level.
