Wayland compositors

I saw a youtube video thumbnail where it looked like someone had coded a tiny village simulation with some really basic graphics. This got me thinking. Could I implement something like this on my Linux machine? I know that windows has wallpaper engine that allows you to have animated wallpapers but my attempts to get this working in the past were not too successful so I wanted to research how wayland works. I started with looking into how wallpapers are drawn since that is the "layer" I would want my graphics to appear on.

I also talked with Veer recently, when he was switching to Linux, about adding an "Activate Windows" style watermark on your desktop. This could also be a fun thing to implement. And of course I started with hoping to use rust to do this since that is the language I am most familiar with.

My first thought was to hijack the wallpaper and modify it on the fly to add my graphics. This turns out to not really be supported.

Wayland splits surfaces into layers:

LayerValueUsage
background0Wallpapers
bottom1Desktop Icons, widgets
top2Notifications, overlays
overlay3Lock screens, OSD

I can't just steal another applications layer, I need to make my own. I'm not sure what happens when 2 application try to use the same layer, like what would happen if I used the background layer when there's already a wallpaper there? Is this compositor dependent? Would I need to look into how KDE works? Or is this universal? I don't know.

This is all I've gathered so far. I might continue looking into it or just get distracted again in the future by some other random thought. Who knows.

SCREAMS IN NEUROSPICY