Missile Defense

You cannot win. The cities always fall in the end. You knew that at nine years old and you fed the machine another quarter anyway.

Missile Defense puts that whole feeling on your Stream Deck. A row of blue cities stands along the bottom keys. Warheads come out of the top of the sky on long red trails, a crosshair walks key to key choosing what to kill next, and the battery answers with fat fireballs that bloom right on a key and cycle white to yellow to orange to red the way an arcade explosion is supposed to. Raids come in waves that grow from three warheads to six, with a lull in between so the panel can breathe, and somewhere in the middle of it a warhead splits in two halfway down and doubles the problem.

Here is the part no other animated Stream Deck screensaver on the market can claim. Everything else for sale is a video: someone animated it once and exported it. This is a simulation. The crosshair scores every incoming threat and picks the one it can actually reach in time, and there are always threats it cannot reach, which is why cities die. The interceptor has to be launched early enough to bloom in the right place at the right moment, and sometimes it is not. A city is handed back every so often, and the skyline you are looking at is a different skyline each time round. Nothing is keyframed. The one honest exception is the last few seconds, which are deliberately staged so the loop closes without a jump: a final salvo levels what is left, the screen goes up in a single shockwave, and the cities are rebuilt one at a time. Everything before that actually played out.

What arrives the moment you pay:

Three animated GIF files, one per deck. Stream Deck MK.2 and the original 15 key Stream Deck at 480x272, Stream Deck XL at 1024x600, and Stream Deck Plus at 800x480. On the XL the battery splits into two flanking positions, which leaves exactly the six cities of the arcade original and gives the interceptor trails a long diagonal to draw across the panel. Use the file that matches your deck and ignore the other two.

A 90 second loop, 2250 frames at 25 frames per second, ending on the frame it began with so there is no visible jump when it restarts. Most animated screensavers are four seconds on repeat and you spot the seam almost immediately. Good luck finding this one.

An illustrated install guide as an HTML page, and the same instructions as a plain text README.

What it does for you: a desk that does not look like every other desk on the internet. Everyone else's Elgato Stream Deck goes black or shows a logo. Yours has a war on it. On camera it is the thing people ask about in chat, and the answer is better than they expect, because it is not a video, it is running. Off camera it is the reason you glance left at midnight and watch a skyline get flattened and rebuilt instead of doing the thing you were supposed to be doing.

Installing takes about a minute. Gear icon, Devices tab, "Set Screensaver", drop the file in, click Set Animation. The guide covers all of it with pictures, including the mistake everyone makes, which is clicking "Set Image" and ending up with one frozen frame. Nothing to install, nothing to subscribe to. Requires the free Elgato Stream Deck app, version 6.6 or newer. Stream Deck Mini and Neo are not covered.

Made by one person who wrote every pixel of it in code, and that same person answers the messages. If something looks wrong, say so and you will get a real reply from someone who knows why it happened.

Buy it, download it, and have warheads falling on your desk in five minutes. If you want more than one design, check the bundle before you check out. It costs less than buying two.

Also known as