Shadow Blade

A masked ninja runs the rooftops of a sleeping city under a full moon, and the whole deck is one continuous scene sliding past rather than a grid of separate pictures. He jumps the gaps between the roofs, and when a guard steps out of the dark or a crow drops on him the sword comes out in one bright arc and it goes up in smoke.

It is the quietest animation in the set and the most deliberately dim. Tiled roofs, water towers and aerials pass in front of a skyline of lit windows, and those windows are kept low and few on purpose — the first version had the city burning bright behind him and he simply vanished into it. Nothing here is keyframed: the rooftops are generated and the ninja is played through them.

Every other animated Stream Deck screensaver on the market is a video loop: somebody animated it once, exported it, and it plays out identically forever because there was never anything underneath. This one is a simulation that was played through and recorded frame by frame, which is why the good moments happen at different places each time it is built rather than at the same place every loop.

WHAT YOU GET. Three files, one for each deck: the MK.2 and the original 15-key at 480x272, the XL at 1024x600 and the Stream Deck + at 800x480. Use the one that matches your deck. An illustrated HTML guide and a plain README come with them, and the guide calls out the one mistake everybody makes once — the app has a "Set Image" button right next to "Set Animation", and the first one gives you a frozen frame.

HONEST LIMITS. This is an animated GIF, so it needs the Stream Deck app version 6.6 or newer. The Stream Deck MINI cannot display animations at all — that is a limitation of the hardware, not of this file, and it is better said here than discovered afterwards. Nothing here is affiliated with, licensed by or endorsed by Elgato or any game publisher; the artwork is original and drawn in code.

[355 words — Etsy has no minimum, but under 300 reads as thin]

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