Inkwell Level Select
====================

12 cel-shaded level select and world map pieces for light interfaces — flat
poster with signal red accents. SVG plus transparent PNG at 1x, 2x and 4x.

Inkwell Level Select is a set of 12 level select and world map pieces drawn in
the cel-shaded style, where a thick ink outline wraps two flat tones split by
a hard diagonal terminator. It contains four stage node states, a straight and
a curved path, each locked and open, a region name plate, a fog of war edge, a
zoom control and a map legend box.

A level select map is built from two things, nodes and the lines between them,
and the lines are what every free set leaves out. Drawing them in engine is
where the map falls apart: a stroke drawn by code does not match the art
style, and a path that is straight in one style and hand-wobbled in another
cannot be a rectangle.

The shadow is a single hard-edged shape with no falloff — the defining
property of cel shading, and the thing a gradient can never imitate. The
outline uses the darkest tone in the palette rather than the border tone, or
it reads as a thick grey frame instead of ink.

Inside that style this is the Inkwell reading of it: a light interface on a
flat poster palette with signal red accents, built around a single bordered
frame, square-cornered buttons at 152x52, banded bars divided into 5 segments,
and solid 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.

The paths ship in the same drawing language as the nodes, straight and curved,
each in a locked and an open reading. Locked is dashed and thin, open is solid
and full weight, which means progress along a map is visible as a change in
the connections rather than only in the nodes. The four node states are told
apart by structure: locked is hatched across, available carries a single dot
at its centre, cleared fills solid and perfect adds four corner brackets to
the filled node. The fog edge is drawn as a stepped band rather than a soft
blur, because a blur rasterises differently in every engine and a map edge is
exactly where that shows.

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 Inkwell family,
which means this kit and the Inkwell panel kit line up without either being
resized. A good fit for cel-shaded and toon-rendered games.

HOW TO USE

  - Place nodes on your own grid and lay the path pieces between them; the
    path sprites are drawn to the node spacing named in the specs box so they
    meet the node edge without overlap.
  - Swap a locked path for its open twin when the stage unlocks rather than
    tinting it. The dash pattern is the signal.
  - Anchor the fog edge to the boundary of the explored region and let it
    overlap the unexplored side; the stepped band is drawn to be tiled
    horizontally.
  - The region plate and the legend box share a corner treatment with the
    panel kit in this family, so a map screen and a menu screen do not look
    like two different games.

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