Star Shards

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

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

Controls:

Up/Down arrows for menu navigation

Z for menu item selection

Left/Right arrows for ship movement

Z for shooting

X for braking

Updates to come will include:

• Menu and in-game music based on the songs from Kingdom Hearts
• Distinct levels, instead of the current survival-esque mode
• Ship customization in the Garage
• Juice, to really make the game feel good

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:

• http://www.scratchapixel.com/
• http://www.codinglabs.net/article_world_view_projection_matrix.aspx
• https://www.3dgep.com/understanding-the-view-matrix/

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

• electricgryphon
  • https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=28077
• orange451
  • https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=2731
• M. Mortatti
  • https://medium.com/@MatheusMortatti/3d-rendering-in-pico-8-7acf535cd125
• krajzeg
  • https://hackernoon.com/pico-8-lighting-part-1-thin-dark-line-8ea15d21fed7