Basalt Loading

Basalt Loading is a set of 20 loading and waiting indicators drawn in the low-poly style, where the silhouette is an angular polygon and the face is split into flat triangles. It contains an eight-frame spinner, a three-frame dot cycle, a loading bar frame with four fill steps, an indeterminate striped bar, two skeleton text lines and a skeleton image block.

The loading screen is the screen a player looks at longest and the one nobody makes art for. It is also the one place where a bar means something different from everywhere else: a resource bar shows a value, a loading bar shows a process, and using the same sprite for both is how a health bar ends up on a loading screen.

Four triangles meet off-centre and each carries its own flat tone, which is exactly how a faceted mesh shades. There are no curves anywhere in the kit and no gradient on any facet.

Inside that style this is the Basalt reading of it: a dark interface on a ash grey palette with magma orange accents, built around a single bordered frame, square-cornered buttons at 120x44, banded bars divided into 7 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 spinner ships as eight frames rather than one sprite to rotate. Rotation exists in every engine, but the number of frames does not — and in a pixel style a spinner that rotates smoothly is wrong, it should step. An eight-frame atlas is correct in both cases and works everywhere. The skeleton placeholders are here for the same reason the spinner is: an empty screen while content loads reads as broken, and a grey block that has the shape of the thing arriving reads as waiting.

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 Basalt family, which means this kit and the Basalt panel kit line up without either being resized. A good fit for low-poly games.

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