KF Hearts Live Wallpaper

( YouTube link )
( Android Market link )

Since we're coming up on Valentine's Day, I figured we should cave to some requests and make an appropriate wallpaper!  This one's relatively simple but has some nice art in it, and has a number of settings to allow you to tweak its appearance.  Plus, you can set it to have puff of little hearts when you tap the screen!

Silhouette v1.5

This is a mostly invisible update that finally brings Silhouette in line with all the other wallpapers, in the sense that it has a consistent upsell dialog box, a how to dialog, etc.  It's also finally using the same back-end as everything else, which will save me some sanity.

Aquarium v2.25

  - New Feature: Fish flee when touched

A bit silly, but kind of fun to play with at the same time.  This actually came as a result of finally getting screenspace to worldspace translation implemented, as I needed it for the flame burst feature in the last KF Flames update.

Final Child's Play Donation!

It's  been a few says since the 15th now, so everybody who was going to keep their Snowfall charity wallpaper should've done so already.  Time to make the last donation!

Okay, so last time we had 24,793 sales.  Searching through Checkout this time, we're at 45,427 sales.  That's over 20k sales in two weeks!  Crazy!

So, let's do the math:

45427 - 24793 = 20634
20634 * 0.34 = $7015.56

I'm really kind of floored how well this has gone, tons of thanks to everybody who picked up a copy, we'll have to do this again next year.  :)

Checking the local Children's Hospital page, they're looking surprisingly set at this point, so I picked them up an extra Wii, WiiMote, and a copy of Spyro for the 360.  This is the second copy of Spyro we've gotten them, but as most 360 games are of the hardcore serious variety it seems important to get something friendlier for that system, to me.

Cost of Items: $313.97
Cast Donation: $6701.59

Total of all donations: $15,445.18

KF Flames v1.05

  - New Feature: Flame bursts on touch!
  - Update: New settings screen style

This is a bit of a silly feature but seems to work pretty well.  Basically, wherever you touch the screen, you'll get a little burst of flame!  There can be up to six of these at once, which seems like enough to feel responsive to me.

This actually got somewhat deep, as my particle system previously only supported looping particles.  This required I support one-off particles, which changed the spawning logic a fair bit, though most of the rest of the logic was fine either way.  I'm sure I'll find some more uses for this in the next few weeks.  :)

Snowfall v1.2

  - New Feature: Santa sightings
  - Update: Visual cleanup
  - Update: New settings theme

The main new thing here is that you'll see Santa and his reindeer fly by here and there, if you enable 'santa sightings' in the options.  This is a bit silly but fun, and will grow more frequent as we get closer to christmas. :)

The new settings theme is due to Samsung completely ruining the Light visual style that I've been using for the various settings screens.  The Samsung rendition is almost unusable, so I'm reverting to the default Settings theme instead.  I'll be doing this as I make updates, it's not an emergency.

Snowfall v1.15

This is primarily a maintenance release that will hopefully improve the framerate a bit.  More importantly the goal is to reduce problems with lockups on HTC phones, which as I've mentioned before can occur any time any OpenGL app is running.  I can't promise anything, but it seems like it happens more in applications that use point lights, so this update switches from lights to tinting to handle its color shifting.

Android Belt v1.2

  Bug Fix: Asteroid numbers building up over time
  Update: Saturn's rings more visible

Pretty much what it says.  The asteroid numbers were indeed increasing when the wallpaper came back from sleep mode.  That was a very stupid bug, I just wasn't checking the current asteroid count before refreshing the list.  It's fixed now.

KF Flames Live Wallpaper v1.0

( YouTube Video )
( Market Link )

There's already like 20 of these on the market, so I figured we'd give it a pass... then someone pointed out most of those are just looping videos.  We can do better than that!

So here it is!  Flames is a reasonably complex particle system that gives you control over flame density, start and end color, and more.  The default is just a black background, but you can select from a few built in ones or select your own custom image.

In addition, you can have the color of the flames change based on which home screen you're on.  You can see this in the video, with the flames turning blue on the far left and deep orange on the far right.

The motion and feel of this one turned out nicely, though it took a few tries to get a fiery feel to it.  The framerate sits in the mid thirties on my Incredible, so should do well on more or less any handset out there.  Hope folks like it!

Second Child's Play Donation

(Check out the previous post if you'd like to see the math!)

Searching our Checkout listings shows 24,793 sales as of 11:30am today.  Subtracting the previous sales, that leaves us with 14,450 sales over the last two weeks or so.  Multiply by 34 cents, and it looks like today's donation is going to total $4,913!  Man, when we decided to do this I never thought it'd get this successful!  That's pretty awesome.  :)

So, the plan is to head to the Texas Children's Hospital wishlist and buy a few games for the consoles we picked up for them last go-round.  The remainder will be sent as a cash donation to Child's Play.  Thanks again for everyone's support!

Here's the games I went with.  In the interest of variety, I tried to pick ones that nobody had purchased for them yet.  Despite that I ended up with a pretty good list!

Need for Speed: Shift for Xbox360
Legend of Spyro for Xbox360
NHL 2011 for Xbox360

Sly Cooper Collection for PS3
Ratchet & Clank Future for PS3
ModNation Racers for PS3
Lego Harry Potter Years 1-4 for PS3

Kirby's Epic Yarn for Wii
Sonic Colors for Wii
Epic Mickey for Wii

Professor Layton & the Curious Village for DS
Pokemon Mystery Dungeon for DS

Games Total: $415.82
Cash Donation: $4,497.18