Jugaccino

Developers Staffan and Thomas Kjellberg have scooped one of the top prizes in Google’s Android Developer Challenge, with their innovative game: Softrace.

The competition was launched to stimulate application development for the new platform. Ten prizes of $275,000 were awarded, and ten further ‘runner-up’ $100,000 prizes were won.

Softrace was the only game in the first category. A GPS racing game, the application is unique as users have to physically do the racing. Running or cycling while using your Android handset’s GPS capability to track your distance and speed, you then compare it with rivals in real time, or at a later date.

“Some races run along predefined tracks while others allow you to run anywhere in the world, in any direction,” says the app’s official press release. “It is like a computer game, except that you are not controlling the player, you are the player.”

One can only assume that since it cost Google $275,000 (mere pocket change to them), the game will be available in the, recently announced, Google App-store.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 1st, 2008 at 1:56 pm and is filed under Game Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.