Alien Swarm

One of them leaves the formation and comes for you specifically. That is the part you remember, thirty years later, and it is the part nobody who makes desk wallpaper has ever bothered to recreate.

Alien Swarm is that swarm, running on your Stream Deck. A formation of insect aliens holds the top rows with their wings beating in place, and one or two at a time individuals peel out of the block, leave a visible hole where they were sitting, and swoop down at the fighter along curving paths. They bank as they turn, so the sprite tips into the direction it is flying rather than sliding across the keys the way a cheap animation does. They fire on the way down. They exit the bottom, come back in from the top, and slot back into the hole they left. Bolts, explosions, score pop-ups. Then a dive connects, the fighter goes up in a fireball on one key, and the swarm flies back in to restock.

Here is what separates this from every other animated Stream Deck screensaver on the market. Those are videos. Someone keyframed a loop once, exported it, and the same choreography has played ever since. This is a simulation. The dive paths are computed, not drawn. Which bug peels off and when is decided as it runs. The bolts are real objects that actually have to reach the fighter, and when the fighter dies it is because something hit it, not because the animator scheduled a death at the eleven second mark. What you are watching is the recording of a game that genuinely played out, once, in code.

The swarm gets reinforcements. The fighter gets one life and an optimistic attitude. It is a fair fight in the same way an avalanche is a fair fight.

You get three files, one per deck, so you install the right shape and nothing comes out stretched: Stream Deck MK.2 and the original 15 key deck at 480x272, Stream Deck XL at 1024x600, and Stream Deck Plus at 800x480. Each is a 90 second loop at 25 frames per second, and the last frame is the first frame, so it wraps with no jolt where it starts over. An illustrated install guide is included as a web page, with the same instructions in plain text, because a digital download that turns up with no explanation is just a file.

What this actually gets you is a desk nobody else has. Your Stream Deck spends most of the day sitting idle looking like a grid of switched-off buttons, and this is a running arcade cabinet instead. On camera it costs you no screen space, no overlay and no CPU load, because the deck plays it rather than your machine. Somebody in chat will ask about it inside a week, and this is the one design in the range where the colour does the work: red and white, amber and blue, a green-headed boss bug, all of it moving at once across every key.

Installing takes about a minute. Gear icon, Devices, "Set Screensaver...", drop the file in, click Set Animation. The guide walks it through with pictures, including the one mistake everybody makes, and if you get stuck you are messaging the person who wrote the code rather than a support queue.

Every animation in this pack is drawn from scratch in code. No traced artwork, no stock footage, no third party assets. Original work inspired by the golden age of the arcade.

Take it home, and give the deck something to do while you are not looking at it.

Works with: Stream Deck MK.2, the original 15 key Stream Deck, Stream Deck XL, Stream Deck Plus. Requires Stream Deck software 6.6 or newer, a free update. Stream Deck Mini and Neo are not covered. Digital download, nothing ships.

Not affiliated with, licensed by or endorsed by Elgato, or by the publisher of any arcade game. Stream Deck is a product of Elgato.

Also known as