Sheep!

WIP games, tools & toy projects
#1

Hi all,

Here’s a project I have been working on for a little while and it is now complete. Although I will slowly add more content to the paid version.

Sheep! Live Wallpaper for Android, as the name suggests is a live wallpaper, not a game, hence why it will live in the WIP section I guess. The sheep mosey around doing whatever it is that they do (which currently includes eating, sleeping, starjumps, waving, baa’ing, looking at you, with more to come).

https://lh5.ggpht.com/Vf5OwPFHaHr1v8b65-7mY_yfIcWYuEgDZyGH2oOY3dQMvs-pjYVCuiAokYQJhDnz9kiQ=h900

https://lh4.ggpht.com/m-lD1dh_S8iDib3DUXwYB7Cab94hQIsKtQLW8MbHAti6sRTDM39ce9LKV3ENEiD0Mg=h900

Sheep! Live Wallpaper (Free): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.nerbtech.sheeplwfree
Sheep! Live Wallpaper: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.nerbtech.sheeplw

Whilst it doesn’t look like much, I’m quite proud of it on a personal level for a number of reasons:

  • It’s the first project I have followed through to completion.
  • It’s my first foray into the world of Android.
  • I worked on the (not so good) artwork myself, giving me a greater appreciation for the amount work that artists put in.
  • About 3/4 of the way through the project I reached the point that it no longer felt fun, and more like a task… but nonetheless pushed on.
  • I had to do some serious debugging. Some was quite straight-forward. Some was quite gnarly and required ‘thinking outside the box’ to solve.

I’m hoping it will get noticed and downloaded a little bit. Still eagerly awaiting negative reviews and reports that it doesn’t work on certain devices!!! :slight_smile:

Anyway, enjoy.

Cheers,
nerb.

#2

I can’t find live wallpaper option in my HTC.

#3

Thanks for pointing this out ReBirth. After a bit of a googling, it appears to be an issue with some HTC phones :(. They’re capable of using live wallpaper, but there is no option to set them. I think I’ll create another activity to set the wallpaper via an icon, which will hopefully get around this.

Cheers muchly,
nerb.

#4

Congratz it is a nice little wallpaper.

Works fine on my S3.

And its funny that I am doing the at the moment nearly the same. A nice wallpaper with sheeps, dogs, birds etc and with user interaction

#5

Works well on my Galaxy Nexus. Really nice.
This made me think, can you add sound to a wallpaper? That would be really fun if you can add some baa sounds. I have not seen wallpapers with sounds, so I am not sure. I am also not sure how to do that as I have not gone into sound for my own project.

#6

There are several live wallpapers with sound. You’d probably only want to let it play sound when you tap the sheep though, background sounds get annoying very fast.

Oh and make the sheep explode if you tap them too many times ;D

#7

Thanks chaps, much appreciated.

Looks very nice indeed. I love the look of your sheep ;D. I’m guessing from the hay bale icon that you are able to feed them?

I tried to implement a PreferenceActivity into my wallpaper too, but ran into trouble. I kept getting an error thrown, something to do with SurfaceHolder.unlockCanvasAndPost(Canvas c). Guessing that I’m not handling the lifecycle events properly, or drawing to the surface after it has been destroyed. I’m hoping I’ll nut it out in the next few weeks.

@Bonev Yes, definitely think you would have to be careful with sound. Wouldn’t want your phone going “Baaaaa” every time you pick it up :D. But it is nonetheless possible.

Funny you say that sproingie. I originally planned to kill the sheep off in random ways, including explosions, but my wife talked me out of it!!! Her point of view was that animal lovers may find it quite offensive… Personally I think it would be great… Might add it in next.

Cheers all,
nerb.

#8

You said it ‘i know it doesn’t look like much’, but i think it actually looks pretty cool (to bad my phone can’t use it, darn T_T). but i like it.

#9

Well going by the Warcraft standard (where said exploding sheep came from) it should take about 50 or so taps. Maybe you could have it just blow all their fleece off or something.

Oh, and alien abductions of course :slight_smile:

#10

If only I had an android device… -_-

#11

Yes, you can feed the sheep and you can move the dogs with drag and drop. =)

What is about a setting menu? Here you can choose how much sheep you will see on the screen and how much clouds etc. or how fast the clouds will move.
Another idea is the day cycle. After 10 pm the heaven has a dark blue color etc and perhaps a sun which is moving …

Yeah, that was my idea too. After 10 taps you see a naked sheep. Thats what I made because my wife doesn’t like the “explosion” idea.

#12

well, as i don’t have an android device, i’m not really sure what the limitations are, but is it possible for the ‘user’ to use a config setting for the wallpaper? if so, i would just put the ‘kill’ stuff into an if statement, if the play has it on, then kill the sheep. (PS. if you really want to do the ‘kill’ thing, have the cheep get attacked by zombie rabbits, or sheep eating carrots, that would be hilarious)

#13

Thanks for the kind words chaps. It’s a bit daunting putting something in the public eye for the first time, so it’s good to hear it’s not complete garbage! :slight_smile:

Most definitely!!

Yes you can implement a settings menu. I think making it optional is a good idea. That way we can all get our exploding sheep fix, and keep our wives happy ;D.

Cheers,
nerb.

#14

Howdy,

Just a quick update. Sheep no longer stand in a straight line, and wander around the screen a bit more. The paid version now features day, sunrise/sunset & night cycles. I’ve implemented a settings menu so that users can choose the number of sheep (between 1 and 15), and set the sunrise and sunset times. I was going to let the user choose the FPS, but I eventually decided against this. Reason being that I could foresee people setting it to max FPS, and then complaining about the exorbitant battery use! Hence it is fixed at 30FPS/UPS.

It turns out that the problems I were having before trying to implement a settings menu were because of a concurrency issue. Surprising in the sense that it was hard to find and wasn’t what I expected. Not surprising in the sense that threads can be sneaky little buggers if you don’t do things properly. The same issue was the cause of (very infrequent and random) crashes, as one would expect with a concurrency issue. It’s all sorted now however.

A hot tip for people new to the Android scene: don’t update your apps too frequently. I generally find a spike in daily uninstalls if I update the app in a short timeframe. At one stage, I had updated the app twice in one day, due to accidentally adding a potential bug into it. This resulted in the most uninstalls that I had seen yet.

Apart from that, downloads of the free version are going very slow (on average about 4 to 10 a day I think). Purchases of the full version are almost non-existent. But to be honest is has exceeded my expectations so far, so I can’t complain. I’ve abandoned all ideas of killing-off or harming the sheep in any way, as from what I can gather people find it ‘cute’ and part of the audience is young children.

Cheers,
nerb.

#15

Thanks lukasz. Unfortunately no I can’t at the moment. I’m not tooled up to do the typical “phone on table” video, and can’t think of any other way to capture it off an Android device. (Could capture it off PC, but framerates are horrible via the Android emulator).

Although now you mention it, I really should purchase a decent camera and do it. Could add the video to the Play store page.

Cheers,
nerb.

#16

Looks good! I’ll give it a shot in a second. First though, I have some questions.
How did you manage 10+ sales on the paid version? :stuck_out_tongue: Friends and family, or did it get noticed by peope you haven’t influenced?
What is the difference between the free and the paid version?
How was this made? Vanilla Android coding, or did you use a framework like LibGDX?