Creating live wallpaper

The live wallpaper extension is a great addition to the AndEngine lineup of available Android development resources. With this extension, we can easily create wallpapers through the use of all the normal AndEngine classes we're used to using for our game development. In this topic, we're going to create a live wallpaper containing a simple particle system that spawns particles at the top of the screen. The wallpaper settings will include a value that allows a user to increase the speed of particle movement.

Note

This recipe assumes that you have at least a basic knowledge of the Android SDK's Activity class as well as a general understanding of Android view objects, such as SeekBars and TextViews.

Getting ready

Live wallpapers are not your typical Android activity. Instead, they are a service, which requires a slightly different approach in terms of setting a project up. Before visiting the code, let's go ahead and create the necessary folders and files for the live...