Designing the interaction
Interactive websites normally treat a pointer as a tool. Move it over something and the interface highlights an affordance; click and something happens. Just Skedaddling starts from the opposite assumption: the artwork should already be doing something, and the visitor should be able to leave it alone.
Interaction as disturbance
The pointer is therefore not a button or a brush. It is a temporary source of force. Particles near it are pushed away, connections can disappear and the colour palette becomes less settled. The visitor can influence the artwork, but cannot directly place a particle, choose a colour or save a composition.
Why the effect fades slowly
If the artwork immediately returned to normal when the pointer left, the interaction would feel like a conventional hover effect. Instead, the internal serenity value recovers gradually. That gives the system a little continuity: something happened, and then the system took time to settle.
Touch works the same way
On touch screens there is no hover state, so touch movement is treated directly as a local disturbance. The mobile version also uses fewer particles to reduce the rendering workload on smaller devices.
The deliberate lack of controls
There is no pause button, colour picker or reset button. Those controls would make sense for a conventional visual tool, but they would also turn the artwork into a product that asks to be operated. Here, the absence of controls is part of the design.
The most useful instruction is simply: leave it alone.