Aqua Hit Effects

Aqua Hit Effects is a set of 12 impact and effect sprites drawn in the cartoon style, where a heavy clean outline wraps a glossy face with a single sparkle. It contains a hit spark and a critical burst, an impact ring and a ground shockwave, a slash arc, a glow orb and a sparkle, a heal mark and a shield bubble and a dust puff, a lightning bolt and rising embers.

Every other kit in this catalogue draws the interface. None of them draw the moment one thing hits another, which is the first thing a combat system needs and the last thing a solo developer gets to. An effect sprite also has no outline to hide behind: it lives on top of the game for a few frames and then it is gone.

The gloss is a hard-edged split at 44% of the height, not a smooth gradient: a soft fade reads as glass, a hard split reads as drawn. The offset drop shadow is solid rather than blurred for the same reason.

Inside that style this is the Aqua reading of it: a dark interface on a deep teal palette with ice blue accents, built around a single bordered frame, square-cornered buttons at 128x40, glossy bars divided into 10 segments, and outlined 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.

Every sprite is centred in a square canvas and symmetric about that centre, so the engine only has to scale and fade — an effect anchored off-centre drifts sideways as it grows, and that reads as a bug rather than a burst. The bodies are single-colour with no outline, because an outlined spark reads as a piece of interface rather than as light. The glow orb is built from stacked discs at falling opacity rather than a blur filter: a filter is rasterised differently across engines and turns to mush at 4x.

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 Aqua family, which means this kit and the Aqua panel kit line up without either being resized. A good fit for anime and cartoon games.

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