Sumi Input Prompts

Sumi Input Prompts is a set of 16 input prompt sprites drawn in the cel-shaded style, where a thick ink outline wraps two flat tones split by a hard diagonal terminator. It contains square, wide and pressed keycaps, four arrow keys, four gamepad face buttons, a shoulder button and a trigger and three mouse button prompts.

A game that supports both a keyboard and a gamepad has to show both, at matching sizes, in the same sentence — and almost nobody ships that art, so it gets drawn by hand at the end of a project when there is no time for it.

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 Sumi reading of it: a dark interface on a charcoal wash palette with seal red accents, built around two concentric frames, tab-shaped buttons at 120x48, glossy bars divided into 9 segments, and outlined 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.

No letters are drawn anywhere in this set. Embedding a typeface means embedding its licence, and a baked-in "E" is wrong in every remapped control scheme and every language; the shapes are here and your engine draws the glyph on top with the font it already has.

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

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