Press kit

Little Honu: A Turtle's Tale

A tiny turtle, a big ocean. A retro pixel-art game that started with a five-year-old asking how games are made.

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How it started

I'm a software engineer, and when my daughter was five she asked me how video games are made. That is a hard thing to explain to a five-year-old, so we made one together instead.

The first version was built out of emojis. A 🐢 swam up the screen, and 🦀 and 🦈 got in its way. It was the quickest way to show her that a game is a set of rules somebody decided on, and that she could decide some of them too.

Then it kept growing. The more we played, the more I wanted it to look like the games I grew up with: chunky pixels, a tiny hero, a big world, and one more try. So I swapped the emojis for pixel art and rebuilt it as a proper retro game, the kind I played as a kid, so I could share a little of my childhood with her.

The name came from her, too. Her grandpa in Hawaii calls her his little honu, the Hawaiian word for the green sea turtle, so the hero of her game was always going to be a turtle.

That's Little Honu. There are no ads in it and it collects nothing, because the first player it was made for was five.

About the game

You play a young honu, a juvenile green sea turtle, and every level is a crossing: scramble down one beach, thread the shore break, and swim the reef and the open blue to haul out on the next island. Crabs snap from the sand, seabirds dive from above, and sharks, hammerheads, giant trevally, an octopus and a monk seal hunt the water, each in its own way. Your turtle breathes, so ghost fishing nets are a real danger: swimming under one is safe, needing air under one is not. There is no level cap, and every crossing gets longer and meaner than the last.

See it in 30 seconds

Free, no ads, no subscription

Levels are never locked, and nothing renews.

Privacy: nothing collected

Screenshots

The zip has full App Store resolution PNGs. Tap one to open it larger.

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