Sumi Hit Effects

Sumi Hit Effects is a set of 12 impact and effect sprites drawn in the cel-shaded style, where a thick ink outline wraps two flat tones split by a hard diagonal terminator. 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 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.

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 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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