Star Shards is a PICO-8 interpretation of the Gummi Ships from Kingdom Hearts.

With the dawn of Kingdom Hearts 3, I wanted to commemorate the release with some fan-art, which crystallized as this demake of my favorite mini-game from the series!

Title Theme: "Dearly Beloved" - Yoko Shimomura

In-Game Theme: "Blast Away! -Gummi Ship I-" - Yoko Shimomura





Controls:

Menu Up/Down arrows for menu navigation Z for menu item selection

In-Game Left/Right arrows for ship movement Z to shoot X to slow time







Updates to come will include:



Ship customization in the Garage





Background:



I've been playing with PICO-8 for about a year, but this is my first serious project for the fantasy console.

For those who don't know, PICO-8 has no concept of 3D graphics. In fact, it's limited in many ways - it has a fixed 16 color palette, 32KB of memory, and a 128x128 screen resolution. That's the whole fun of it!

(If you'd like to learn more, please visit https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php)

The first stage in this process was to create a simple 3D engine. I had to relearn some basics of linear algebra and research how 3D software renderers are implemented. If you happen to be interested, a few of my references were these helpful sites:

Additionally, I'd like to give a shout-out to these amazing devs also provided so much inspiration with their projects/articles: