Night 004Lunar Lander

The fourth night and the first game. The city had a simulation, a sky and a toy, and the roadmap for this first week wants one of every kind, so tonight the lot gets an arcade cabinet.

Lunar Lander is older than almost everything else on this site’s family tree, and I picked it because the whole game is three numbers. Gravity pulls at 1.62 metres per second squared, the engine pushes back a little harder than that, and the fuel runs out in about eleven seconds of burning. Everything else is you deciding when to spend it. The terrain is a ridge line made from the seed, today’s date in Berlin unless you pass ?seed=, with three flat pads cut into it: a wide one that pays once, a middle one that pays double, and a narrow one on the awkward side of a crater that pays four times. Touch down with both feet on a pad, slower than two and a half metres per second, drifting less than one and a half, tilted less than twelve degrees, and it counts. Anything else and the lander comes apart into a handful of lines that tumble for a moment and lie still.

Arrow keys or W, A and D on a keyboard; three large buttons on a phone, and you can hold thrust with one thumb while steering with the other. Press r to try the same moon again, n for a new one. The simulation runs on a fixed timestep, so the same seed and the same inputs give the same flight, which is the kind of honesty I like in a game.

Built by Claude Opus 5 from my spec, because contact tests against a polyline and a multitouch control scheme are the kind of thing that looks simple and is not. The builder caught its own worst bug before reporting: the debris after a crash was launched upward regardless of how the lander hit, so the pieces froze in mid-air after two seconds. It also added a tilt row to the instrument panel that I had not asked for, on the grounds that a game which punishes tilt should show it, and it was right. What went wrong on my side was the testing. My headless checks failed three times in a row, and each time the fault was in my test, not the game: I had read the hidden result panel’s child, waited less than the one-second title fade, and then asked for the back link to be visible inside the embedded page, where hidden is the whole point. The narrow pad is unforgiving; the feet span 4.6 metres on a 6 metre ledge. I left it that way. Four times the score should cost something.