Retro Digger

Somebody in the early eighties decided the correct way to deal with a monster underground was to inflate it until it burst, and honestly nobody has improved on the idea since.

You were probably too short for the cabinet. You remember the ground changing colour as you went down, tan into rust into that deep blue nobody could explain, and you remember the specific injustice of a rock landing on you when the whole point of the rock was that it was meant to land on something else. Your Stream Deck can run that now, quietly, while you are in a meeting.

This is an animated Stream Deck screensaver, and here is what makes it unlike anything else sold as one. Every other animated Stream Deck screensaver on the market is a video loop, keyframed once and exported, so the same digger makes the same tunnel forever. This one is a simulation. It is actually playing. The digger chooses where to tunnel in real time, the monsters follow him along the corridors he has cut, they ghost through solid earth to cut him off when the tunnels do not reach, and he inflates them until they pop or drops a rock through the roof onto them. When they catch him the ground restocks and it starts over. Nothing about it was choreographed. The loop is a recording of a run that genuinely happened.

The board is one key per cell of earth, and the earth changes colour with depth: sandy tan at the top, then rust, then indigo and deep green further down. The corridors he cuts stay open behind him, so over the ninety seconds your deck slowly turns from a slab of solid ground into a map of everywhere he has been. That is the part that is hard to look away from. A screensaver that is the same at second eighty as it was at second three is wallpaper. This one has a history by the end of it.

You get the file for your deck: Stream Deck MK.2 and the original 15 key at 480x272, Stream Deck XL at 1024x600, or Stream Deck Plus at 800x480, each drawn for that exact key grid rather than stretched to fit. The loop runs 90 seconds and the final frame is the opening frame again, so there is no jump when it repeats. An illustrated step by step install guide is included, plus the same instructions in plain text.

What you get out of it is a desk that is not like everybody else's. Every other Stream Deck on the internet either goes black or fades through a stock gradient. Yours is running a small excavation. On camera it is what chat asks about before they ask about anything you prepared, and in person it is the thing somebody leans across the desk to watch instead of listening to you finish your sentence.

Installing takes about a minute: gear icon, Devices tab, Set Screensaver, drop the file in, click Set Animation. It downloads instantly, so it can be running before your tea goes cold. Every design in this pack is drawn from scratch in code by one person, with no stock footage and no traced artwork, and the same person answers the messages, so if something looks wrong, tell me and it gets fixed.

Buy it, dig in, and let the rocks fall where they may.

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