Animals in the dark: a moonlit meadow screensaver

Children love a screen with animals on it, and so do plenty of grown-ups. Animals in the dark in Screensavers by Zaweba shows cartoon frogs, rabbits, deer and bees going about their night in a moonlit meadow. Frogs hop, rabbits and deer graze, bees buzz about, and fireflies drift and glow among the grass.

It belongs to the night pack, so the meadow is dark and the animals and fireflies provide the light and movement. It makes a gentle choice for a child's PC or a family computer in the evening.

A note on the artwork

The animal art in this screensaver is placeholder drawing for now, kept until finished sprites are supplied. The scene works and the animals move as they should, but they are simpler than the final versions will be. It's worth knowing that before you set it up, so you know what to expect.

Animals, speed and brightness

Number of animals runs from 1 to 16. One animal on its own in a quiet meadow is peaceful, and lets a young child follow it around the screen. Sixteen makes a lively meadow where something is always happening.

Which animals lets you choose which of the four kinds appear. If a child loves rabbits, you can have a meadow of rabbits. If bees are a worry, leave them out. Mixing all four gives the most variety.

Speed sets how quickly the animals move. Slow suits a bedtime screen, where you want calm rather than excitement. A little faster is more fun to watch during the day.

Night brightness decides how dark the meadow is. A darker meadow keeps the room dim and makes the fireflies stand out. A brighter one shows more of the scene and works better in a lit room.

Setting it up for a child

For a bedroom screen at bedtime, try a few animals, a slow speed and a low night brightness. The fireflies then do most of the work, and the screen stays dim. For a playroom PC in the daytime, more animals, all four kinds, a middling speed and a brighter meadow give children plenty to spot.

Try each change in the manager, where the live preview follows along. Then use Preview full screen to see the meadow at its real size. Any key, click or small mouse movement closes it, which also means a child can't get stuck in it.

Using it as your screensaver

Use this screensaver builds it into your profile with no administrator rights needed, then opens Windows' Screen Saver Settings so you can choose the wait time and the password option. That makes it easy to set up on a child's own Windows account without needing an administrator. Settings are read each time the screensaver starts, so you can change the animals or the brightness later in the manager with no rebuild.

With more than one monitor, choose a meadow on each screen, one meadow stretched across all of them, or the main monitor only with the others black. A stretched meadow lets animals wander from one screen to the next.

Mixing it with others

Animals in the dark pairs well with Aquarium, another favourite with children, and with the busier Space traffic for older ones. Tick a few in Install several and the screensaver picks one at random each time. On a laptop, the battery saver in Install and options turns the screen black when the battery drops below the level you choose, so a long evening of fireflies won't flatten it.

If small hands have been busy in the settings, Reset to defaults puts everything back as it was.