Wildmane: Blood Bay

She lives behind your windows

Not an overlay, and not always-on-top. She lives on the wallpaper layer, behind every window you have open, across all of your monitors at once. Close a window and you might catch her standing behind it. She has no window of her own; the desktop is her window.

She has opinions about you

Alt-click an empty patch of desktop and she'll come, usually at a lope, sometimes overshooting because she got a little too excited.

Or maybe she won't. Her refusals are never random; she always has a reason, and if you've been ignoring her, you're it.

Left alone, she doesn't just settle down. She escalates. First she looks up at where your cursor is. Then she drifts closer and stops just short. Then she starts inventing errands: rechecking a corner she already checked, acting like she meant to go there. If you still don't respond, she stops asking and puts her head down to graze, which is the only thing she does all day that isn't about you.

She sulks, too, when she's put herself out there for you, and you stop paying attention to her. If she crosses three monitors at a lope because you called and gets nothing for it, she'll turn her hindquarters to you and you'll have to earn her back.

After midnight she stops performing entirely and just stays close.

Things to do with a Wildmane horse

• Hide carrots — four carrots appear on the desktop, tucked behind your open windows. Move a window, reveal a  carrot, and she'll spot it and run over. When she gets all four, she celebrates.

• Play ball — click to send it rolling; she fetches and knocks it back with horse-grade aim. Ignore her for half a minute and she starts playing alone.

• Tic-tac-toe — a board scratched into the ground. You place crossed sticks, she walks over and stomps a horseshoe. She's beatable. She's a horse. If she wins, she'll gloat.

• Horseshoes — exactly what it sounds like.

Hand-built, one frame at a time

No motion capture, no asset store, no procedural gait solver. Twenty-two hand-animated clips by someone who's actually spent time around real horses: a proper walk, a real trot, a lope with the correct footfall order, a rear, two different bucks, and a graze where her head actually reaches the ground.

If her legs look right to you, that's why.

She knows she's a guest

She never steals a click: anything in a window belongs to that window. She runs at 30fps only while she can actually be seen; covered up or screen locked, she idles down to almost nothing. She doesn't read your keyboard, and nothing about you leaves your machine.

Assign her to individual monitors or set her paddock manually. Resize her, mute her, and pause her.

A herd

Wildmane horses are built to run alongside each other. This one is complete on her own; she is not a piece of a set, and nothing here will nag you to buy anything. But she was designed with company in mind.