Sumi Cursors
============

12 cel-shaded mouse cursors for dark interfaces — charcoal wash with seal red
accents. SVG plus transparent PNG at 1x, 2x and 4x.

Sumi Cursors is a set of 12 mouse cursors drawn in the cel-shaded style, where
a thick ink outline wraps two flat tones split by a hard diagonal terminator.
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 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 Sumi reading of it: a dark interface on a
charcoal wash palette with seal red accents, built around two concentric
frames, tab-shaped buttons at 120x48, glossy bars divided into 9 segments, and
outlined icons on a 32px 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 Sumi family, which
means this kit and the Sumi panel kit line up without either being resized. A
good fit for cel-shaded and toon-rendered 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/sumi-cursors
More free assets: https://www.colorosse.com
