Inkwell Status Effects

Inkwell Status Effects is a set of 12 status effect frames and duration indicators drawn in the cel-shaded style, where a thick ink outline wraps two flat tones split by a hard diagonal terminator. It contains buff, debuff and neutral frames, permanent and expiring frames, five duration ring steps, a duration bar and a stack count badge.

A buff icon sits on screen for three seconds and the player never looks straight at it — they catch it in the corner of their eye. That rules out the usual solution: a green border for good and a red one for bad collapses in colourblind modes, and it collides with whatever colours the game itself is already using on that HUD.

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 Inkwell reading of it: a light interface on a flat poster palette with signal red accents, built around a single bordered frame, square-cornered buttons at 152x52, banded bars divided into 5 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.

Buff and debuff are separated by shape instead. The buff frame pushes its corners outward and the debuff frame folds them inward: one grows, the other eats. Both survive a greyscale screenshot. Duration is a ring around the icon rather than a bar beneath it, because a bar pushes every icon down a few pixels and breaks the row. The rings ship as five steps rather than one sprite because most engines cannot clip an SVG at runtime — a filling ring is either a shader or a step atlas, and the atlas works everywhere. The frames ship empty: your own effect icon goes in the middle.

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 Inkwell family, which means this kit and the Inkwell panel kit line up without either being resized. A good fit for cel-shaded and toon-rendered games.

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