Charcoal Hit Effects

Charcoal Hit Effects is a set of 12 impact and effect sprites drawn in the hand-drawn style, where every edge is sampled and nudged, so no line is truly straight. 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 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.

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 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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