GameDeck

Control your music and skip YouTube ads without ever leaving your game.

GameDeck is a lightweight Windows tray app that puts music and YouTube ad-skip on global hotkeys and a small in-game overlay, so you never have to alt-tab out of a fullscreen game to change a song.

• Global hotkeys control any media source (Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music, anything) and keep working even over exclusive-fullscreen games.
• A translucent overlay shows the current track and fades itself out, click-through by default so your game never loses input.
• YouTube ad-skip from in-game, with a small companion browser extension, on a single keypress.

No accounts, no OAuth, no telemetry. Nothing leaves your machine.

Early development. The app is usable today (media engine, global hotkeys, overlay, YouTube ad-skip, settings window), and the pieces below all work. Expect rough edges until the v1.0 tag.

Install

1. Download the latest GameDeck-x.y.z-win-x64.zip from the Releases page.
2. Unzip it anywhere and run GameDeck.exe. The release build is self-contained, so you do not need to install a .NET runtime or anything else.
3. No window opens. GameDeck lives in the system tray (look for its icon near the clock). Play something and try Ctrl+Alt+O.

SmartScreen

GameDeck is a new app without a paid code-signing certificate yet, so Windows SmartScreen may warn you ("Windows protected your PC") the first time you run it. This is expected for small open-source tools. To run it:

1. Click More info on the blue SmartScreen dialog.
2. Click Run anyway.

You only see this once per downloaded build. If you would rather not, you can build from source instead.

A winget package is planned for the v1.0 release, which will let you install with a single winget install command and skip the SmartScreen prompt.

Hotkeys

All hotkeys are rebindable in the settings window, and conflicts with other apps are flagged there.

Hotkey	Action
Ctrl+Alt+Space	Play / pause
Ctrl+Alt+Right	Next track
Ctrl+Alt+Left	Previous track
Ctrl+Alt+O	Show / hide the overlay
Ctrl+Alt+I	Make the overlay clickable (drag it, click controls)
Ctrl+Alt+S	Skip the current YouTube ad

What you get

• Global hotkeys over any game, including exclusive fullscreen. Raw-input engines that used to swallow registered hotkeys (DOOM Eternal was the reported case) are now covered by a low-level keyboard-hook fallback. See the FAQ for the details.
• In-game overlay: a small translucent card (album art, title, artist, progress) that fades in on track changes and hides itself after a few seconds. Click-through by default, so your game never loses input. Works over borderless and most modern fullscreen games. Drag it where you want it (Ctrl+Alt+I) and it stays there, per monitor.
• Settings window (right-click the tray icon): overlay opacity, auto-hide delay, corner presets, hotkey rebinding with conflict warnings, media source pinning, and the extension token.
• YouTube ad-skip: with the companion extension installed, the overlay shows a strip when an ad is playing in a background YouTube tab (amber while unskippable, green when the skip button is up), and Ctrl+Alt+S clicks skip for you. You hear music again without touching the browser.
• Tray icon with a now-playing tooltip, playback menu, media source picker (Spotify vs. browser vs. anything else), and an opt-in "Start with Windows" setting.
• Works with any media source that integrates with Windows SMTC: Spotify desktop, YouTube in any browser, Apple Music, and more, with no accounts or OAuth.

Setting up ad-skip

1. Install the GameDeck Companion extension. The Chrome Web Store listing is pending review; until then, load the extension/ folder unpacked via chrome://extensions with Developer mode turned on.
2. Right-click the GameDeck tray icon and pick "Copy extension token".
3. Open the extension's options page, paste the token, and hit Save. The status dot turns green when it finds the app.

How it works

• Global hotkeys (RegisterHotKey) work over any game. When a raw-input engine swallows them in exclusive fullscreen, a WH_KEYBOARD_LL keyboard hook picks up the same combos as a fallback. Both are OS-level input APIs that never touch the game process.
• The overlay is a transparent WPF layered window that shows track info and album art over borderless and modern (DXGI flip model) fullscreen games, click-through by default. Legacy exclusive-fullscreen games can hide it; the hotkeys still work.
• Media control goes through Windows SMTC (GlobalSystemMediaTransportControlsSessionManager), so one integration covers every media app, works offline, and needs no accounts.
• YouTube ad-skip runs through a companion browser extension that talks to the app over a WebSocket bound to 127.0.0.1.

For the full picture (component diagram, threading model, and the reasoning behind each choice), see docs/architecture.md. The app/extension message format is in docs/bridge-protocol.md.

Security model, honestly

The extension and app talk over a WebSocket bound to 127.0.0.1 only, so nothing ever leaves your machine. A token you copy from the tray and paste into the extension stops other local programs from feeding the app fake ad state. On skip, the extension presses the same skip button you would press (and if YouTube ignores the synthetic press, it jumps to the end of the ad instead, but only while the skip button is showing). It never touches your mouse, keyboard, focus, or the game. No telemetry on either side.

FAQ

Will this get me banned by anti-cheat? GameDeck never injects into or reads from a game process. It uses ordinary OS input APIs (RegisterHotKey and a keyboard hook) and draws a normal top-most window, the same category of thing Discord and Steam notifications already do. It does not hook the game's rendering. See the non-goals.

The overlay does not show over my fullscreen game. Some games present their frames in a way that no other window can draw on top of: true exclusive fullscreen, and OpenGL games such as Balatro and Geometry Dash. The overlay cannot appear there, and that is a deliberate limitation (the fix would be swap-chain injection, which risks anti-cheat bans). The hotkeys still work, so you can change tracks blind. Tracked in issue #11.

If the overlay is missing in borderless (where it normally works), the usual cause is Windows Fullscreen Optimizations giving the game an exclusive-like fast path. Turn it off for that game: right-click its .exe, open Properties, then the Compatibility tab, check "Disable fullscreen optimizations", and relaunch. A true windowed mode always works.

My hotkeys did nothing in a fullscreen shooter. Earlier builds could miss hotkeys in raw-input exclusive fullscreen (this was tracked as issue #3, reported against DOOM Eternal). A low-level keyboard-hook fallback now covers that case, so the hotkeys fire even when the game swallows the registered ones. If you still hit a game that eats them, please open an issue.

Windows warned me the app is unrecognized. That is SmartScreen on an unsigned new app. See Install for how to run it.

Does it need Spotify Premium or a login? No. It drives whatever Windows reports as the current media session, so it works with the free tier and with any other player.

Build from source

Requires the .NET 8 SDK.

dotnet build                            # build the solution
dotnet test                             # run the Core unit tests
dotnet run --project src/GameDeck.App   # launch the app

Contributing

Bug reports and feature requests are welcome as GitHub issues. If you want to send a change:

• Work on a branch off main (feat/, fix/, or chore/), and open a pull request. CI (build plus the Core unit tests) must pass.
• Keep logic that can be unit-tested in GameDeck.Core, which has no UI dependencies, and add tests for it. The WPF layer stays a thin adapter.
• Please do not add DirectX/Vulkan hooking, DLL injection, or anything that touches a game process. That is out of scope permanently (see below).

Non-goals

• No DirectX/Vulkan/OpenGL hooking or DLL injection, ever (anti-cheat risk).
• No macOS or Linux. This is a Windows 10 (19041+) and Windows 11 app.
• No full music-client features (search, playlists, queue management).
• No telemetry. No data leaves your machine.

License

MIT