Run an Empire smashes £15k Kickstarter goal

Fitness-based game Run an Empire has surpassed its £15,000 crowdfunding goal on Kickstarter with a week still left to go for the campaign.

The mobile title enables players to capture territory either unclaimed or captured by others by walking, jogging or running through it.

After passing its goal, developer Pan Studio has revealed it will also bring the game to Android devices, having previously been developing the title for iOS only.

At the time of writing the campaign has made £17,820 from 1,422 backers.

Developrecently spoke to co-creators Ben Barker and Sam Hill about the project, who believe Run an Empire can fill an under-exploited gap in the fitness games market.

“Like a lot of people, I suspect, I grew up enjoying the puzzles and immersion of tabletop and computer games, but couldn’t really ever get into competitive sports, which I felt required some requisite level of co-ordination and physical skill that I lacked,” he Hill.

“There’s a very real under-exploited potential in personal devices to allow us to take part in entirely new forms of localised, physical, asynchronous competitive play. Games like Ingress and Zombies, Run!, and applications like Foursquare and Runkeeper have definitely tapped into some innate appeal – but maybe the next step is an entirely new typology of physical play – a kind of augmented ‘Frankensport’ – something with a new applicability and purpose.”