Home Screen Arcade

Home Screen Arcade is a game platform that runs entirely on the home screen of your Android device.

It's a tech demo - an experiment in what can be done with normally-staid home screen components - but it's also surprisingly playable. Your game controllers are widgets, your score and game status are shown in a (heads-up) notification, and the action happens in a live wallpaper.

As a demo, this version of the app includes open-source tributes to three classic arcade video games, as well as an open-source pinball (arguably the most classic arcade game of all). See the Credits below for details. All four games are functional, but improvement is always possible; the goal here is to demonstrate the platform. As such, only the minimum of changes was made to each game's existing source code.

If you're interested in the platform's source, the core is GameWallpaperService, an abstract WallpaperService subclass that ties the platform together:

It serves as a base class for the live wallpaper services that implement specific games.
It receives action broadcasts from the game-control widgets, passing them along to its descendants as method calls.
Broadcasts from the actual game code are also received here to update score, level, and other game status, which GameWallpaperService displays as a heads-up notification.

Subclasses of GameWallpaperService serve as the interface between Home Screen Arcade and the actual game code. Like all wallpaper services, each implements both the Service and its inner Engine class. Each is responsible for managing the lifecycle of the game itself, and also implements an onDraw method, which is where the game's graphics get transferred to a Canvas that will be shown on the device's home screen.

##Credits and Licensing

Pinball is adapted from Vector Pinball under the GNU General Public License 3.0

The button image is used with the gracious permission of Colin O'Dell

Fuusio/homescreenarcade

Home Screen Arcade