Bug Blaster

Every mushroom on that board is a shot you took. The field gets worse because of you.

That was the cruel little joke buried in the arcade cabinet you fed your lunch money to, and it took about a week of standing on a milk crate to work it out. Shoot a segment, get a mushroom. Shoot enough segments and the thing you were trying to hit is now four separate things winding down through a forest you planted. Your trackball hand went slick. Somebody's mum was waiting in the car.

This is an animated Stream Deck screensaver, and the thing that separates it from everything else sold as one is that it is not a video. Every other animated Stream Deck screensaver on the market is a rendered loop that somebody keyframed once and exported. This is a simulation, running for real. The centipede is actually marching, actually turning down a row when it meets a mushroom or the edge, and actually splitting into two shorter centipedes wherever a shot lands, each of which then goes its own way. The blaster tracks along the bottom band and picks its column. A magenta spider bounces through the lower rows on a path of its own, and sooner or later either the spider or the last surviving head runs the blaster down, the field is restocked, and it begins again. Nobody animated that. It played out, and the loop is the recording.

Three colours carry the whole thing at a glance: green chain, red mushroom caps, gold blaster. The segments are joined by a dark link drawn underneath the bodies so that four lit keys read as one animal crossing the bezel gaps rather than four peas in a row, and the legs ripple one phase out from their neighbour, which is the difference between a centipede and a snake. Everything else was cut, because a Stream Deck key is about 68 pixels wide and there is room in it for exactly one idea.

You get three files, one per deck, so you install the one that matches and ignore the others: Stream Deck MK.2 and the original 15 key at 480x272, Stream Deck XL at 1024x600, Stream Deck Plus at 800x480. The loop runs 90 seconds and ends on the frame it started with, so there is no visible jump when it repeats. An illustrated step by step install guide is included, plus a plain text version.

What you actually get out of it is a desk that is yours. Everyone else's Stream Deck goes black or cycles a stock gradient. Yours quietly plays a game to itself between takes. On stream it is the thing chat asks about before they ask about anything you planned, and at a desk it is the thing visitors lean over to watch instead of listening to you.

Setup takes about a minute: gear icon, Devices, Set Screensaver, drop the file in, Set Animation. It downloads instantly, so it can be running before your coffee is cold. Every design in this pack is drawn from scratch in code by one person, no stock footage and no traced art, and that same person reads the messages, so if anything looks off, say so.

Add it to your cart and go plant some mushrooms.

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