Aqua Cursors
============

12 cartoon mouse cursors for dark interfaces — deep teal with ice blue
accents. SVG plus transparent PNG at 1x, 2x and 4x.

Aqua Cursors is a set of 12 mouse cursors drawn in the cartoon style, where a
heavy clean outline wraps a glossy face with a single sparkle. 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 gloss is a hard-edged split at 44% of the height, not a smooth gradient: a
soft fade reads as glass, a hard split reads as drawn. The offset drop shadow
is solid rather than blurred for the same reason.

Inside that style this is the Aqua reading of it: a dark interface on a deep
teal palette with ice blue accents, built around a single bordered frame,
square-cornered buttons at 128x40, glossy bars divided into 10 segments, and
outlined 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 Aqua family, which
means this kit and the Aqua panel kit line up without either being resized. A
good fit for anime and cartoon games.

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/aqua-cursors
More free assets: https://www.colorosse.com
