Carbon Cursors

Carbon Cursors is a set of 12 mouse cursors drawn in the realistic style, where a five-stop specular gradient runs down a brushed metal face with rivets at the corners. 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 brush texture is a 3px line pattern rather than real noise: noise triples the PNG weight for a texture nobody can see at 1x. The shadow is layered rather than blurred so it holds up at 4x.

Inside that style this is the Carbon reading of it: a dark interface on a near black palette with warning amber accents, built around four corner brackets in place of a closed border, chamfered buttons at 152x44, hollow-cored bars divided into 14 segments, and two-tone 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 Carbon family, which means this kit and the Carbon panel kit line up without either being resized. A good fit for realistic and simulation interfaces.

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