Vector Asteroids

Every cabinet in that arcade was shouting at you in colour except one, and the one you could not stop watching drew thin white lines on black and made no attempt to sell itself at all.

Vector Asteroids is that screen, running on your Stream Deck. White wireframe rocks tumble across the keys with a bright beam core and a soft phosphor bloom either side of every line, the way a vector monitor actually drew them, because a vector monitor did not have pixels, it had a beam. There is no colour anywhere except a yellow shot, an orange thrust flame and a green saucer, and that restraint is the entire point. On a dark desk this does not look like a picture on a screen. It looks like a screen.

The rocks drift at constant speed and wrap around the edges of the deck, so a rock that leaves the right-hand column is already coming back in on the left and is drawn in both places at once. The ship turns to face something, holds, and fires along the row it shares with it. Every hit splits a big rock into two smaller ones that carry on from where the big one was, leaving perpendicular to it, so a split actually reads as a split. When the ship runs out of room it thrusts sideways a key, and when that fails it comes apart into its own five drifting line segments. A saucer runs a row every twenty seconds or so and shoots back.

It solves every problem by turning one large problem into two medium problems. Deeply relatable, and it never learns.

Here is what separates this from every other animated Stream Deck screensaver on the market. Those are videos. Somebody keyframed a loop once, exported it, and the same choreography has played ever since. This is a simulation. The rocks have velocities, not paths. The ship picks its own target, waits for its own shot to clear, and dodges when something is predicted to reach it. Nothing here is choreographed. What you are watching is the recording of a game that genuinely played out, once, in code.

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, plus the same instructions in plain text.

What it gets you is a desk nobody else has, and specifically one that is not loud about it. Vector Asteroids is the design to pick if the rest of your setup is black, if you work in the room you stream in, or if you want the deck to be interesting without being a distraction sitting in the corner of your eye all day. It costs no screen space, no overlay and no CPU, because the deck plays it rather than your machine. On camera the near-black keys with white lines crawling across them are the thing somebody eventually asks about, usually at the least convenient moment.

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, not 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 nobody is 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.

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