It's been a while since I've posted news about Ghost SEED, the location-based MMO for Android, and there have been some interesting changes.
One of the most interesting for me has been the addition of Quantum Density, which addresses a common problem with location-based games: what do you do if no one around you plays? With PVE games like Parallel Kingdoms it's bad enough. It's murder for PVP games like Ghost SEED, though.
What Quantum Density does is look for a certain minimum of activity. If the game doesn't see enough activity around you, it starts looking farther afield until it either finds enough activity to make the game fun or until it can't find anything within a few hundred kilometers. The Quantum Density is calculated based on how far away it had to look - the farther it has to look, the lower the Quantum Density is. The Quantum Density is used to calculate your reach (how far away you can affect things), and the range of your SEEDs (how far away *they* can affect things). You can see in the screenshot above that if there isn't much going on, your reach ends up extending pretty far. In this example (on our test server), I can sit in Seattle and place SEEDs in Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, B.C.
SEEDs that are placed keep the Quantum Density that they were placed in. This means that those big, big SEEDs will remain big as the density goes up. FORTs - the SEEDs that conquer territory - behave a little differently as the Quantum Density rises. Normally you can't place an enemy SEED within a FORT, and FORT ranges can't overlap. With Quantum Density, FORTs can only block SEEDs that have the same or lower density. This means that when the Quantum Density changes in an area, suddenly existing FORTs become quite a bit more vulnerable. This is a feature I added to both prevent large FORTs from dampening play within their range, and to reward players who make the effort to understand the mechanism. It's possible for attentive players to predict when the Quantum Density will change in an area, and to take advantage of that.
Other updates include some UI changes. The overlay style was changed to make it more efficient to draw, the overall UI was changed to the new Android Holo theme (most of these screenshots don't show the complete Holo UI), and a tactical view was added, which colorizes SEEDS and regions based on their owner, not hostility.
Ghost SEED is available on Google Play, so please check it out!
