A zombie game created with UNIST students' unique ideas and technical skills was selected as the best hackathon work.

UNIST announced on the 8th that the game 'My Running Mate, Zombie' developed by the Dino team, comprised of UNIST students and alumni, won the 'Junction X Seoul 2021' hackathon held from May 21st to 23rd.

In this game, zombies are swarming around the screen, and you have to run to avoid being bitten by them. If you run with your smartphone, the character on the screen will run at your running speed. If you avoid the zombies within the time limit and reach the safe zone safely, you survive, but if you get bitten by a zombie, you become a zombie and infect other players.

Running Mate Zombie Game is a game that recognizes the actual running speed of the user and makes the character on the game screen run. Users are connected online and can catch up or fall behind each other depending on their speed.

The Dino team is a group of UNIST students and graduates. The team consists of six members: Kim Ji-wan (developer, team leader), a graduate student in the Department of Design, Lee Ji-young (designer), a student in the Graduate School of Design and Engineering Convergence, and Kang Sang-kwon (developer), Lee Do-young (developer), Jang Han-sol (planner), and Jo Gwang-min (designer).

They took on the challenge presented by AWS Gametech. They created a running game using sensors in smartphones and cloud services provided by Amazon Web Services.

Team leader Kim Ji-wan explained, “In a situation where social distancing continues due to COVID-19, we wanted to provide an experience where users can run together,” and “We thought it would be a good idea to use the zombie element to create a more fun reason to run.”

The Dino team was selected as the final winner by the participants’ votes and was recognized for their excellence in service development. The final winner was awarded 3 million won in prize money. The Dino team was also evaluated as 3rd place in the Amazon Web Services Game Tech Track. They were evaluated as being able to take care of health and human interaction at the same time in the COVID-19 situation.

JunctionXSeoul is Korea’s largest global hackathon. IT developers, designers, and planners of all ages participate in the competition, presenting solutions based on cutting-edge technology to topics presented by companies. This year’s competition had approximately 400 participants from 25 countries around the world. They participated as individuals or teams and conducted hackathons online.

Junction is the largest hackathon in Europe, held in Finland, and Junction X Seoul is a licensed version of Junction that has been held since 2019.