A territorial fitness game: close a GPS loop and the polygon becomes yours. Rivals take it back by re-running your route with 85% coverage, measured by Hausdorff distance.
A running game about land. Run a closed loop and the ground inside it becomes your territory, until somebody else laces up and takes it back.
The itch
Running apps are excellent at telling you what you did: pace, distance, a medal for beating yourself. What they never give you is a reason to go out on the day you do not feel like it.
TerraRun borrows one from childhood games. Land. Run a loop and the area inside it is yours on a shared map. If someone wants it, they have to go and run it.
Turning a jog into a polygon
The rules had to be strict enough to be fair and loose enough to survive GPS.
- A run counts as a loop if it ends within 50 metres of where it began.
- The trace is simplified, then turned into a polygon and checked for area and overlap.
- A territory can be anything from 500 square metres to 50 square kilometres.
- A new claim may overlap existing turf by at most 25%, so you cannot simply draw a bigger circle around someone.
Taking territory
To capture someone’s land you re-run their route with at least 85% coverage. “Did you run the same route?” is a fuzzier question than it sounds, so similarity is measured geometrically, as the distance between your trace and a buffer zone around theirs.
A speed cap of 45 km/h keeps cars off the leaderboard.
Under the map
The map updates live over WebSocket. An in-memory spatial index answers “what is in this viewport?” quickly, while PostGIS remains the source of truth for the geometry.
What I do not know yet
Every game-balance number above is an environment variable, on purpose. I will not know the right values until real runners start arguing about them.
Where it stands
An early prototype: a Go backend and a React frontend that start with one command. There is no public server yet, and snapping traces to real roads is still on the list.