Aqua Cursors

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.

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