Maze Chase

The ghosts do not know they are a screensaver.

Maze Chase is an animated screensaver for the Elgato Stream Deck, laid out one key per cell, so every key on your deck is a square of the playfield with a dot sitting on it. A yellow disc works its way around clearing them while four ghosts hunt it down. It runs for ninety one seconds and then comes round again, seamlessly, and it will do that quietly on your desk for as long as you leave the room.

Every other animated Stream Deck screensaver on the market is a video loop. Somebody animated a chase once, exported it, and it plays out identically forever because there was never anything underneath it. This one is a simulation. The four ghosts are not following a drawn path: each has its own idea of where to head for, and each picks a direction at every junction based on where the disc actually is. One goes straight at him. One aims two cells ahead of where he is going, so it keeps arriving before he does. One cuts across behind to close the escape. And the fourth, which is the detail people notice on the third watch, loses its nerve whenever it gets within three cells and peels off for its own corner. Nothing is keyframed. What you are watching is a game that genuinely played out and was recorded frame by frame.

So the good parts happen because they happened. He takes a power pellet, all four turn blue and run for the furthest corner from him, and he chases them down for 200, then 400, then 800, then 1600, with the board stopping dead for a beat each time so the score can sit on the key where the ghost used to be. The eyes float home to be let out again. Fruit crosses the middle of the board partway through and he breaks off to go and get it. Near the end he gets cornered, does the spin, and the board restocks itself for the next run.

The download holds three animations, one for each deck: Stream Deck MK.2 and the original 15 key at 480 x 272, Stream Deck XL at 1024 x 600, and Stream Deck Plus at 800 x 480. The loop is seamless because the last frame is the first frame again, pixel for pixel, so there is no jolt when it restarts. There is an illustrated install guide, and the same guide in plain text if you would rather just read it.

What you get out of it is a desk that does not look like everybody else's. This is the animation people lean over and ask about, and on camera it is a conversation that starts itself while you are doing something else. It costs you nothing to run, because it only shows up when you are not touching the deck. And at some point on a Tuesday you will look down, catch a ghost turning blue, and be ten years old in a room that smelled of carpet and hot electronics.

Installing takes about a minute. Gear icon, Devices tab, Set Screensaver, drop in the file for your deck, click Set Animation. It works on Stream Deck MK.2, the original 15 key Stream Deck, Stream Deck XL and Stream Deck Plus, with app version 6.6 or newer. The download is instant, so this is on your deck five minutes from now. Every animation here was drawn from scratch in code by one person, with no traced artwork, no stock footage and no third party assets, and that same person answers the messages, so if anything looks wrong just ask.

Buy it, drop it in, then sit still for a minute and let it start.

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