HONC: The Building Blocks of Life by Jake White

made by Jake White for LD 44 (JAM)

Pronounced "honk", HONC is a 3D space exploration game about giving Life to a solar system by distributing Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen, and Carbon. Explore and document the planets of System No.1876.

Technical details: the game runs at 144p with limited color palette/scan line/distortion shaders to create an old-school effect :) This would be a very fun postmortem to write, I think.

There is a web version and a Windows version, just scroll down the itch.io page to the downloads section (added the Windows version after the jam on 4/30/19). Windows is in my opinion the definitive version due to mouse first-person lock control being consistent.

Controls are on the itch page :)

NOTE: The three music tracks in this game were created outside of LD44 by Benjamin Busche. All other sound design was done in-jam by myself.

Source code	https://github.com/jake-white/HONC
HTML5 (web)	https://jake-white.itch.io/honc-the-building-blocks-of-life
Windows	https://jake-white.itch.io/honc-the-building-blocks-of-life
Original URL	https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/honc-the-building-blocks-of-life

Ratings

Given

20🗳️

10🗨️

Feedback

tjakka5

30. Apr 2019 · 02:20 UTC

Awesome game! You've got a really cool art style going on that immediatly caught my eye. I for one would be very interested in that post mortem ;)

Cassio Eduardo

01. May 2019 · 00:24 UTC

This is beautiful. The atmosphere and the graphics are great, but the controls are really sensitive. I think it would be better to have a message like "Press 'E' to manage the planet." appear when the player gets in the range of the planet instead of just taking the control from the player like that, it's kind of annoying.

But this is a pretty well made game. Good job.

invader

01. May 2019 · 17:34 UTC

Just amaizing retro-space look and atmosphere! The scenes of flying between the planets of a star system reminded me of obscure old DOS space exploration game Noctis - unique and underappriciated gem (sure, it was not in 144p, but in standrad dos VGA 13h 320x200 - but the look is unbelievably similar!).
Nice job!

🎤 Jake White

01. May 2019 · 21:12 UTC

Thank you for the kind words :) @cassio-eduardo I do agree, I think that would be a lovely solution as I was frustrated by the planets ranges at times myself.

I hope to continue working on this game and flesh it it out to maybe make it more "game-y" as well.

kmazzio

01. May 2019 · 23:04 UTC

I love the whole atmosphere of the game, and the music makes it even better. I don't really see the connection to the theme all that much, but still a great looking game.

ryusui

01. May 2019 · 23:30 UTC

Love the graphics, but the gameplay is really clunky. I ran out of elements to distribute and I couldn't turn quick enough to follow the one asteroid I got notified about. Mouselook is really slow for some reason!

🎤 Jake White

01. May 2019 · 23:42 UTC

@ryusui probably should have made it more clear, there are a couple of asteroid belts in the system that you can farm and events should spawn as you complete planets. thanks for playing!

@kmazzio I definitely struggled with the theme, was aiming for "building blocks of life" as the currency rather than life directly.

Mr_Field

01. May 2019 · 23:53 UTC

![uhoh.png](///raw/746/z/24429.png)

More of a meditation software than a game, has a fantastic relaxing mood to it. I'd be interested to see if you do any more work on this, I can imagine a whole ton of directions it could take from here.

palsina

02. May 2019 · 15:55 UTC

I loved it, specially the lo-fi aestethic. I would have liked if you had to mine the resources separately perhaps? I don't know, but this is one of my favourites, I just like space games.

johnnysix

02. May 2019 · 19:34 UTC

Loved the style - reminded me of old early 90's PC games. Took a while to figure out I was getting closer to planets. Would love to see more post dare.

![ld44db04.png](///raw/028/2/z/24627.png)

Rahtainka

02. May 2019 · 22:32 UTC

Solid entry with nice graphics and mood.

**Positive things: **

- nice graphics
- great atmosphere and mood
- cool music

**Negative things: **

- I didn't get how to get ressources back
- the distances between the planets are a little bit to far in my opinion. It was hard to guess how near or far I was from the planets.

Overall a solid entry. Well done.

alexrose

04. May 2019 · 15:10 UTC

Fun game. I think it could've benefitted with waypoint indicators off screen for each planet number and for the asteroid belt. I kept losing the belt so I couldn't replenish resources, and when a planet was under attack I had no idea where to look. Other than those minor player feedback things, found this fun and interesting. Great job.