Target GPS City Game for La Mosca
The Client
La Mosca is a start-up company from Belgium that develops and promotes new generation of city games on mobile phones using the GPS technology. La Mosca, knowing about experience Azoft had with mobile and GPS applications, asked us to develop technical part of the games, such as mobile applications downloaded to the phones and server administrative part.
The Scope
Develop two mobile applications for J2ME and one for Windows Mobile platforms with GPS functionality and also the back-end system for administration purposes.
The Solution
Two mobile applications were developed in J2ME, and the server processing part of the games in J2SE, while the administrative server part uses J2EE. The database used for these projects was MySQL. The processing module residing on the server receives GPS data from players’ phones, processes them, and sends them back to the participants along with notifications of game events. It also controls the course of the game with the data it hides from the gamers (for example, the distances between teams are made available to them at 50 m precision, so they cannot be sure if their shooting will be successful), and server administrative module implements web-interface for setting initial game data (game area, location of items, participants etc.).
The Windows Mobile application was a proof of concept used in a TV show featuring a quest game in ancient fortress. The application generated the static fortress map on the mobile screen and sent GPS data from mobile to the server.
The Challenge
La Mosca GPS city games projects required simultaneous development of both mobile and server parts. We had to implement several technologies at once ensuring seamless integration: J2ME CLDC 1.1/MIDP 2.0, Windows Mobile, J2SE, J2EE, MySQL, Java Servlets, Apache Tomcat 5.5.
The Outcome
Collaborating with La Mosca Azoft has developed innovative mobile applications with remote server interaction on both Java and Windows platforms, that support extensive maps and GPS data usage with user-friendly interface, and implement sophisticated gameplay in an intuitive way.