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Imangi surprises with Temple Run 2: interview with developer Keith Shepherd
Imangi Studios is one of our favorite game developers: Keith Shepherd and Natalia Luckyanova are a husband and wife team that have made some great titles for iOS, including Harbor Master, Max Adventure and the company's biggest hit, Temple Run. Since going freemium (and getting extraordinarily popular), Temple Run has turned Imangi into a very successful company, both with the original game's in-app purchases, and with a series of ports and spinoffs, including the Disney-powered Temple Run Brave. Now, without any previous announcement, the company has released a full-fledged sequel, Temple Run 2, on to the App Store, available right now as a free download. "It's going to be sort of a surprise announcement," says Keith Shepherd, who chatted with TUAW earlier today. "Being a sequel kind of gave us the opportunity to start fresh and use what we'd learned." Shepherd says Imangi wanted to "level up the look and feel of everything" with the sequel, but of course the couple was also dealing with the success of their first game, and the arrival of their first child at the same time. "We have a baby now in the house that's impacted our own time," says Shepherd, "and we decided if we were going to do something bigger that we'd need some help from other folks." So they decided to two add two more people to the core team of three, joining forces with another developer called FuzzyCube software. FuzzyCube hosts a few developers who've formerly worked at Microsoft's Ensemble Studios, and Shepherd says having their expertise around definitely makes Temple Run 2 look better than ever before. "It takes place in an all-new world and environment, and I think you'll be blown away by how great it looks," he promises. The game's look and feel isn't the only big upgrade: There are also new powers and abilities to encounter in the endless runner, and Imangi decided to accept some fan feedback and fill out the game's characters a little bit. In the original game, characters were only cosmetic, but in the sequel, each character has their own ability that players can power up and use at a certain time. "It adds a little bit of a strategic element" to the action-based gameplay, says Shepherd. Those abilities can also be powered up by the game's new currency: gems, in addition to the coins players earned in the original. Temple Run started out as a paid app, and Imangi only switched it to freemium to try and shore up some flagging popularity. But of course once the game went free, Temple Run found some huge success, and Shepherd says Imangi has decided to start out free with the sequel. That extra currency is designed to keep players playing -- "We are using the gems more for some of the consumable type things," says Shepherd -- but Imangi also wants to make sure that the freemium aspect of the game doesn't get in the way of players enjoying it. "What happened with Temple Run 1 from a gameplay standpoint is that we really ran out of things for people to spend their coins on really fast," Shepherd says. "But we followed that same path of being really generous with coins in Temple Run 2." Fans of the first game should love the additions to the second, but even if not, Shepherd says the original title won't be far away. "We're keeping it on the App Store," he says. "It's a classic at this point, and we don't want to remove it for folks who want to continue playing the original. We do have some plans for some things that we want to add to it still, and obviously we do have some plans for adding things to Temple Run 2." Imangi, like a lot of successful app developers, has known for a long time that updating a game post-launch is a great way to keep it popular, and Shepherd says that "with Temple Run 2, we completely rewrote the entire game so that it would be easier." Finally, Shepherd tells us that while this Temple Run sequel is the current focus, we'll still see some more original titles from Imangi in the future. "I think in the short term, we have a lot of work still to do on Temple Run 2 and Temple Run, and we're probably going to have most of our focus on that," he says. "But I think we're really itching to work on a new game too. That's why we got into this business: To really enjoy making games. We always have ideas that we're kicking around," he promises, "so you'll see some more things in the future." Temple Run 2 is now available on the App Store for free.
Temple Run downloaded over 2.5 million times on Christmas day
In the world of impressive holiday sales numbers, Minecraft doesn't stand alone with its 453K Christmas sales. Imangi Studios Founder Keith Shepherd recently tweeted that Temple Run was downloaded over 2.5 million times on Christmas day.The numbers divide up pretty cleanly, too, as Shepard noted that a million downloads came from iOS devices, another million from Android and the final 500K from Amazon. Of course, this is all a drop in the bucket compared to Temple Run's 100 million download mark, which it crossed in early August.
Imangi finds success, and more choices, with Temple Run
Imangi Studios' Keith Shepherd and Natalia Luckyanova have been making solid games on iOS for years now, from their original hit Harbor Master and their charming dual-stick shooter Max Adventure. But it wasn't until Temple Run this past year (which I first saw in an off-the-record prototype form at GDC last year) that Imangi really hit it big. The freemium game has over 40 million players already, and it's consistently sitting up among the top-grossing spots on the App Store. Imangi's perfectly happy with that success, if not a little overwhelmed by it. "This is ridiculous, what is happening," says Luckyanova. Temple Run actually came at a great time for the couple -- they've just purchased a house, and they have a baby on the way, so they'll definitely be busy ove the next few months, even without a new game. And Shepherd says that's the plan: While Imangi has "a lot of ideas, they're all on the back burner for now." The current goal is to push Temple Run as far as it will go. First things first, that means an Android release -- Imangi has announced the game will arrive on that platform on March 27. After that, says Shepherd, you might see Temple Run in a few other places, including the Mac App Store, and somewhere on the web, in a browser-based form. The couple has also had requests for versions of the game on PC and Facebook, so they're considering those as well. The issue with having this kind of success on the App Store, however, is that once you get a popular game up and running, your inbox starts to fill with all kinds of offers: Merchandising, porting, offers for other markets, and different amounts of money that come with each. Imangi says they're considering all of these, but their main goal is to stay as independent as possible. "We like being independent," says Shepherd. The couple have always had an artist working with them as a third developer, and have since brought on a few more people to help with support and other tasks, but "we're not trying to grow," they say. And that's the biggest issue with selling the company itself. Certainly, they've had offers from bigger publishers, but "if we were to really sell the company," says Shepherd, "we'd have to grow the team a lot." And while they admit extra resources might be nice, Imangi still seems perfectly happy as a core team of two. On iOS itself, Temple Run is getting an update in the next few weeks, with more objectives to take on, possibly more environments to run through, and some "powerup stuff" as well. But outside of that, Imangi is taking a well-deserved breather on development at the moment, and focusing on simply growing all of the business they have. What advice do they have for other developers searching for freemium success? "You need to start with solid work," says Luckyanova. Imangi's been putting good games together on iOS for a while, and so it was probably only a matter of time before one of their titles was able to pay off.
GDC 2011: The future of Imangi Studios
The husband and wife team of Keith Shepherd and Natalia Luckyanova make up Imangi Studios, the iPhone developer behind line-drawing hit Harbor Master. We've been following the duo for a while now, and we last talked to them at WWDC, when they were pretty far along in development with a game called Max Adventure, a dual-stick shooter with a plucky kid with a laser gun for a hero. Max Adventure was released last December (and has since been updated), and Imangi tells me at GDC that the launch went well -- mostly. "It was the best launch we've had on our own," says Shepherd, adding that both the ratings and sales numbers were great after the game released in mid-December. "But then...," says Luckyanova, trailing off. Then, it turns out, came the EA sale, filling the App Store charts with 99-cent sales of premium EA titles, and Imangi's carefully crafted Max Adventure got "crushed" in the Christmas rush. But the best part of the story is what happened next: a little while after Imangi had a blue Christmas, EA called them. The company liked Imangi's games and wanted to talk about a possible publishing deal.
Watch a Max Adventure level get created in three minutes
The good folks at Imangi Studios (husband-and-wife team Natalia and Keith) are hard at work on their latest iPhone game Max Adventure, and they've been sharing updates from the trials and tribulations of making a big iPhone game via their twitter accounts. Among those updates today was this little gem above -- Keith Shepherd hammering out a Max Adventure level over a time-lapse video. It's pretty cool to see, not only for how he builds the level block-by-block, but to see what changes as he goes along versus what apparently was the original plan. The whole time lapse plays out from a four hour period of real time, and considering how big the game will eventually be, this is probably a drop in the bucket. Shepherd also says the level editor is one that Imangi actually built for themselves, alongside Max Adventure (though presumably they'd be able to use it for other apps as well). Fun little behind-the-scenes of an iPhone game on this Saturday afternoon.
WWDC 2010: Hands-on with Max Adventure and interview with Imangi's Natalia Luckynova
Natalia Luckynova is half of Imangi Studios. Along with her husband Keith Shepherd, she makes iPhone and iPod games, including the popular Harbor Master and a few other titles. We got to meet up with her at WWDC last week, and she was able to show off their latest title, Max Adventure, due out for the App Store in just a few weeks' time. The game was heavily improved since I last saw it in action, and it's shaping up to be a quality dual stick shooter -- a little kiddy, but with a fun element of exploring a nice mix of environments and an actual story to follow. You can see the game above, and once you've checked it out, be sure to head after the break, where Luckynova tells us how the company's first iPad game is doing, what they think of iPhone 4 and iOS 4.0, and how she learned what a Kraken is.
Hands-on with Max Adventure from Imangi Studios
Keith Shepherd and Natalia Luckynova are the husband-and-wife team that make up iPhone developer Imangi Studios, creators of the popular Harbor Master iPhone game and its iPad cousin. I got to meet them both at the 360iDev conference a few weeks ago, and they kindly showed me an as-yet-unnamed game that was still in the early stages of development. They said it would be a little while until they unveiled a trailer for it, and then this week they sent out the trailer above. The game has been named Max Adventure, and Imangi Studios tells us they hope to release it a few more months from now. The version I played at 360iDev was very early -- the menus were still in bits and pieces, and there were no real missions or text yet implemented. But the story was told to me: the protagonist (Max, apparently) is a kid who lives in the suburbs, and when all of the parents get ported off of the planet, it's up to him to save his friends (and eventually, you'd assume, the world).
