Charcoal HUD Frames

Charcoal HUD Frames is a set of 10 heads-up display frames drawn in the hand-drawn style, where every edge is sampled and nudged, so no line is truly straight. It contains a minimap frame with a north marker, a character portrait frame, a compass strip, three crosshair reticles, an objective waypoint marker and a quest tracker plate.

These are the pieces that stay on screen the whole time a game is being played, which makes them the hardest to get right: every one of them has to be readable over arbitrary game art without covering the middle of the screen.

The wobble is deterministic rather than random: the same box wobbles the same way every build, which is what lets it live in version control. Shading is cross-hatching, because a gradient under a drawn line reads as a filter rather than as a hand.

Inside that style this is the Charcoal reading of it: a dark interface on a smoke grey palette with ember orange accents, built around a single bordered frame, tab-shaped buttons at 160x52, hollow-cored bars divided into 7 segments, and two-tone 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 quest plate marks a completed objective with a filled box and a struck-through line rather than by dimming it, so the tracker stays legible against a bright sky. The compass ticks alternate major and minor so a heading can be read at a glance rather than counted.

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 Charcoal family, which means this kit and the Charcoal panel kit line up without either being resized. A good fit for notebook and storybook games.

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