Sandbox Loading

Sandbox Loading is a set of 20 loading and waiting indicators drawn in the voxel style, where each surface is the front face of a cube with a lit top face and a shaded right face. 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.

The extrusion is real geometry rather than a shadow: the light angle never changes, there are exactly three tones per block, and the front face is inset so the cube stays inside its own sprite bounds.

Inside that style this is the Sandbox reading of it: a light interface on a desert tan palette with sky blue accents, built around a header band across the top of the frame, chamfered buttons at 112x40, banded bars divided into 12 segments, and two-tone icons on a 16px 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 Sandbox family, which means this kit and the Sandbox panel kit line up without either being resized. A good fit for voxel and blocky games.

Creative Commons Zero 1.0 — Public domain. No credit required. Full terms · What this means in practice