Aetherlab Cursors
=================

12 magitech mouse cursors for dark interfaces — lab navy with aether cyan
accents. SVG plus transparent PNG at 1x, 2x and 4x.

Aetherlab Cursors is a set of 12 mouse cursors drawn in the magitech style,
where pointed corners and a circuit trace carry arcane colour — fantasy with
wiring under it. It contains an arrow and an arrow with a wait ring, a
pointing hand and a move cursor, a crosshair and a target lock, attack, talk
and loot cursors, busy, blocked and text cursors and a resize cursor.

A game that draws its own interface and then leaves the operating system
cursor on top of it has a hole in the middle of the screen, and it is the part
the player looks at constantly. Cursors are also the one sprite that has no
control over its background: it passes over sky, stone, fire and inventory in
the same second.

The pointed corners come from the shape vocabulary rather than from a fantasy
frame, and that is deliberate: this style is the tech half of magitech, not
the carved half. Gradients and outlined compositions alternate through the set
so a spell panel and an instrument panel can share one screen.

Inside that style this is the Aetherlab reading of it: a dark interface on a
lab navy palette with aether cyan accents, built around a single bordered
frame, chamfered buttons at 144x36, hollow-cored bars divided into 22
segments, and two-tone icons on a 24px grid. Those measurements are why two
families can share an art style without being interchangeable: the style
decides how an edge is drawn, the numbers decide what the interface is for.

Every cursor carries an outline in the opposite end of the palette from its
body, which is what keeps it readable over a background the kit knows nothing
about — a dark cursor over a dark cave disappears, and no amount of styling
fixes that. The hotspot is named in the file title of each sprite rather than
left for you to guess: the arrow clicks at 0,0 and the crosshair at its
centre, and a hotspot that is off by three pixels is a game where the player
misses what they aimed at.

Every sprite ships as an editable SVG and as transparent PNG at 1x, 2x and 4x,
so you can drop the PNGs straight into an engine or open the vector and change
a colour. Built to the same measurements as the rest of the Aetherlab family,
which means this kit and the Aetherlab panel kit line up without either being
resized. A good fit for magitech, alchemy and arcane-science interfaces.

HOW TO USE

  - Set the hotspot from the sprite title when you register the cursor — arrow
    and hand click near their tip, crosshair and target at the centre of the
    sprite.
  - Use the 32 px PNG for a hardware cursor and keep it to whole-number
    scaling; a hardware cursor is composited by the OS and a fractional scale
    is where the outline goes soft.
  - Swap to the attack, talk and loot cursors from your interaction raycast
    rather than tinting one cursor, because the silhouette is what a player
    reads at a glance, not the colour.
  - The blocked cursor is for a refused action, not for a disabled control — a
    disabled button already says that with its own sprite, and using both at
    once says it twice.

License: CC-BY-4.0 — see LICENSE.txt
Page: https://www.colorosse.com/assets/2d/ui/aetherlab-cursors
More free assets: https://www.colorosse.com
