Show HN: Lander, a lunar lander style web game (opens in new tab)

This feels like an achievement:

  Unbelievable, the crater is visible from Earth
  
  Score: 190.2 point crash
  Speed: 1612.3mph
  Angle: 98.6°
  Time: 220 seconds
  Flips: 0
  Max speed: 1612.3mph
  Max height: 4534ft
  Engine used: 15 times
  Boosters used: 129 times
  https://ehmorris.com/lander/

How is this a crash, because of the angle?

    So, so close to a landing, but still a crash

    Score: 1.6 point crash
    Speed: 2.5mph
    Angle: 12.2°
    Time: 20 seconds
    Flips: 0
    Max speed: 34.5mph
    Max height: 221ft
    Engine used: 20 times
    Boosters used: 14 times
    https://ehmorris.com/lander/

This is my best attempt for now:

    A good landing, keep trying

    Score: 84.1 point landing
    Speed: 4.5mph
    Angle: 0.0°
    Time: 23 seconds
    Flips: 0
    Max speed: 32.5mph
    Max height: 221ft
    Engine used: 26 times
    Boosters used: 13 times
    https://ehmorris.com/lander/

Nice one.

The left-right feel swapped to me, but I fail to give a factual reason.

Also reminds me of two 90s era DOS games: Ugh and some other about landing on Moon. Similar to yours, but the lander looked like a small tower/crate (for lack of better description).

Pretty fun! I like trying to make as many flips as possible:

  Basically a fender bender, but you landed
  Score: 45.4 point landing
  Speed: 3.5mph
  Angle: 9.5°
  Time: 62 seconds
  Flips: 18
  Max speed: 86.8mph
  Max height: 1276ft
  Engine used: 32 times
  Boosters used: 55 times

The amazing thing is all these lunar lander games are harder than actually landing the lunar lander that landed on the moon. That's right it used a computer stabilized system and featured a fully automatic landing program however every lander was actually landed in the semi automatic mode where the pilot controlled the descent but the attitude was still maintained by computer.

Apparently, it's all about feathering the throttle. Very nice!

Near-perfect landing, super smooth

Score: 96.5 point landing Speed: 1.1mph Angle: 0.7° Time: 45 seconds Flips: 0 Max speed: 43.7mph Max height: 256ft Engine used: 73 times Boosters used: 37 times https://ehmorris.com/lander/

---

I see it took you about seven months from "Initial Commit" to its current state. How did you stay on track all that time?

On an iPad, it’s very hard to hit the left/center/right targets accurately. I got some successful landings, but there was a lot of, “No I said center, not left… no, center, not right… ah crap!” If there were keyboard controls, that would help, I think.

Doesn't work for me. I can't get past "2 arrows at the same time". I press them, and see flame from both side thrusters, but the game doesn't register that I've done 2 arrows, and does not let me play. Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/110.0

Tried to get a good landing with as few control actions as possible. For a simple new scoring system, subtract your number of control actions from your landing score:

  Very nice landing, amazing

  Score: 90.5 point landing
  Speed: 2.9mph
  Angle: 0.2°
  Time: 18 seconds
  Flips: 0
  Max speed: 53.7mph
  Max height: 425ft
  Engine used: 1 times
  Boosters used: 3 times

So, a score of 86.5 in the new system.

Had a great time seeing how fast I could make it go!

Impressive speed, impressive angle - you crashed with style

Score: 89.2 point crash Speed: 761.4mph Angle: 41.4° Time: 82 seconds Flips: 0 Max speed: 761.4mph Max height: 344ft Engine used: 97 times Boosters used: 45 times https://ehmorris.com/lander/

Think I found a bug! Left the tab (on Firefox mobile on Android) and then revisited it, and now it says: "Perfect landing, incredible, you can't get better than this" with a score of 102.3 (I'm assuming 100 is supposed to be the max score?).

Just landed safely, so think I am sending my resume to NASA for the upcoming Moon mission.

https://imgur.com/a/Qq5lqOm

Awesome, the highest crash landing speed I was able to achieve was 97.7 MPH after about 20-30 attempts.

Wanted to play, but after the tutorial a first touch makes the ship disappear. When I reload the page, I can see the ship again, and the landing curve, then again if I touch the screen everything disappear except for the stars.

It would be nice if the "how to play" screen gave keyboard equivalents. I was about to give up trying to play until I saw someone's comment about arrow keys.

Still addicted. Two suggestions: 1. Factor in time to landing in the score; faster times score higher. 2. Add an option to make the meteor debris damaging.

Suggestion of improvement: landing should only be successful if lateral velocity is inside a limit.

Couple of great UX things I’ve found

- the game doesn’t let you play without knowing how to use the controls, and it shows them in real time - whenever you tap, the tap area lights up.

Small Details that make a difference!

I found the font saying the speed and angle were much too small to read, and hard to read against the background anyway, so it was unplayable. No one else seems to have had that problem! macOS 12.5, firefox, 24 inch 1920x1080 display - pretty normal sized. Maybe it works on a phone. I tried zooming in but then I couldn't see the ground, and the font didn't get bigger.

Fun game! It would add more to the game imo if there was a fuel efficiency target as well as angle and speed.

As ever, this is the kind of problem I find more fun in programming a computer to solve than in solving myself, by hand. But this is a fun implementation! Good controls, too - it only took me two tries to land, which is better than I ever managed with an Apple II and a keyboard as a kid.

I'd love to see an indicator showing how quickly you are rotating. That would make the final touchdown a lot easier to get straight, IMO.

Also, could the trajectory stay visible at all times? That would help plan burns better.

Enjoyed playing! Controls are smooth. Would you mind sharing tech used to design the game and exported to html?

Fun! I'd like to get a bonus for rotations in both directions.

This is like KSP but without the fun.

Good fun. A couple of ideas, zoom in as you approach the landing site, it's hard to see the difference between 4mph and 1mph; and consider having no landing spots, like craters or sharp edges; finally, some slow flying asteroids to avoid every once and a while. Consider planting a little flag from previous landing or tombs on crash sites on restart, to have some continuity. :)

  Perfect landing, incredible, you can’t get better than this

  Score: 99.2 point landing
  Speed: 1.0mph
  Angle: 0.2°
  Time: 52 seconds
  Flips: 0
  Max speed: 31.5mph
  Max height: 389ft
  Engine used: 99 times
  Boosters used: 7 times
  https://ehmorris.com/lander/

I think my initial conditions were advantageous..

Great game!

To counter those occasional asteroids that bizarrely, coincidentally seem to blast through the exact spot where the lander lands — how about adding the ability to take off again once having landed?

For folks for whom this is scratching an itch, highly recommend you check out Reentry: An Orbital Simulator. It is a beautiful indie passion project trying to faithfully recreate all aspects of the 1960s space era, in which you'd go through the actual steps necessary to operate the aircraft, including the lunar lander. It's awesome in it that it tries to be faithful, like NSSP and things of the nature, while also not cutting corners in the "game-like" parts of the experience, like textures, audio design, missions, VR capability, etc. If you enjoyed this for more than a few minutes, you'll enjoy poking around in it!

You'll never improve on Astro Chicken :). Seriously, I loved that game when Space Quest III came out, although it seems others had quite a different experience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zgt17LwmT7c

I created a discrete (and less realistic) version of this concept here: https://qewasd.com/ ("Lunar Landing" challenge) - try to get a score as close to 0 as possible!

Some people have managed to use MILP solvers to optimally solve some of the other problems

Code here: https://github.com/void4/qewasd

Landed on first try, years of playing Kerbal Space Program have come in handy :D

I like this kind of game, and this is perfect for a short diversion! This is the best I can muster for now:

    Very nice landing, amazing

    Score: 90.1 point landing
    Speed: 2.8mph
    Angle: 0.4°
    Time: 9 seconds
    Flips: 0
    Max speed: 38.7mph
    Max height: 240ft
    Engine used: 10 times
    Boosters used: 10 times
    https://ehmorris.com/lander/

Tons of fun aiming for the different types of high scores. Here are mine:

131 point crash - https://i.ibb.co/YdJ1c8B/131.png 426 max speed landing - https://i.ibb.co/5k5Csjt/Max-Speed426.png

Near-perfect landing, super smooth

Score: 97.5 point landing Speed: 1.4mph Angle: 0.2° Time: 17 seconds Flips: 0 Max speed: 53.3mph Max height: 377ft Engine used: 15 times Boosters used: 12 times https://ehmorris.com/lander/

Love this! Very simple and creative.

  A solid “C” landing

  Score: 71.9 point landing
  Speed: 4.7mph
  Angle: 2.5°
  Time: 276 seconds
  Flips: 27
  Max speed: 114.4mph
  Max height: 1323ft
  Engine used: 58 times
  Boosters used: 63 times
  https://ehmorris.com/lander/

  I don’t think we’re getting back to Earth

  Score: 34.4 point crash
  Speed: 187.5mph
  Angle: 122.8°
  Time: 88 seconds
  Flips: 7
  Max speed: 187.5mph
  Max height: 2336ft
  Engine used: 11 times
  Boosters used: 49 times
  https://ehmorris.com/lander/

Amazing.

  A fast crash, but it could be faster

  Score: 82.9 point crash
  Speed: 689.8mph
  Angle: 56.2°
  Time: 79 seconds
  Flips: 0
  Max speed: 689.8mph
  Max height: 725ft
  Engine used: 3 times
  Boosters used: 46 times
  https://ehmorris.com/lander/

Neat!

Couple thoughts:

* I first played this on my phone and the controls are basically backwards, touching right side of screen activates left booster. May be a subjective preference but when I went to a desktop and used the arrow keys (right key -> right booster) that was way more intuitive.

* Does it consider sideways velocity in judgment? Like 5MPH up and down vs a little bit sideways.

* For the love of Smoot please let me change to metric. Angles in radians would be fun too.

Dunno how much complexity you want to add, but limited fuel would be a nice challenge to add. Or landing spot which is moving (up and down or sideways).

Unbelievable, the crater is visible from Earth

Score: 198.9 point crash Speed: 1,600.2mph Angle: 179.0° Time: 336 seconds Flips: 2 Max speed: 1,600.2mph Max height: 55,433ft Engine used: 7 times Boosters used: 97 times https://ehmorris.com/lander/

Nice job on the game! Fully usable on my iPhone and only took me like 7 tries to actually land. Bookmarked to study the code and learn how you achieved such a nice end result. Thanks for posting.

Unbelievable, the crater is visible from Earth

Score: 465.6 point crash

Speed: 4010.5mph

Angle: 178.0°

Time: 986 seconds

Flips: 509

Max speed: 4010.5mph

Max height: 409430ft

Engine used: 4 times

Boosters used: 126 times

https://ehmorris.com/lander/

It's 1 AM, I need to go to sleep...

Very addictive.

One thing that would be interesting would be a mode where you have limited fuel.

Also, the ability to set different buttons would be good. Towards the end of the landing I want to use one hand for left-right, and the other for the booster rocket, and this is awkward.

Nice Game.

  Perfect landing, incredible, you can’t get better than this

  Score: 99.3 point landing
  Speed: 0.2mph
  Angle: 1.0°
  Time: 22 seconds
  Flips: 0
  Max speed: 33.6mph
  Max height: 227ft
  Engine used: 12 times
  Boosters used: 11 times
  https://ehmorris.com/lander/

Great fun!

Terrible landing, you need to land slow and straight

Score: 18.6 point landing Speed: 10.0mph Angle: 8.9° Time: 23 seconds Flips: 0 Max speed: 22.5mph Max height: 248ft Engine used: 25 times Boosters used: 16 times https://ehmorris.com/lander/

Great game. It took me a while to figure out how to start the game. I'd put a "Press space bar to start" somewhere.

I think you meant to do that

Score: 75.8 point crash Speed: 509.3mph Angle: 172.9° Time: 101 seconds Flips: 0 Max speed: 509.3mph Max height: 6618ft Engine used: 8 times Boosters used: 42 times https://ehmorris.com/lander/

It took a lot of tries, but I just barely made it eventually! Btw I'm on my Pixel 7 and it works better than I'd like expected on a phone. Seems like it'd be easier with a keyboard though?

A near-crash, way too fast

Score: 35.0 point landing

Speed: 9.7mph

Angle: 5.6°

Time: 8 seconds

Flips: 0

Max speed: 35.9mph

Max height: 197ft

Engine used: 2 times

Boosters used: 6 times

https://ehmorris.com/lander/

Basically a fender bender, but you landed

Score: 53.6 point landing Speed: 9.8mph Angle: 1.4° Time: 566 seconds Flips: 182 Max speed: 635.2mph Max height: 62510ft Engine used: 109 times Boosters used: 145 times https://ehmorris.com/lander/

Unbelievable, the crater is visible from Earth

    Score: 345.1 point crash
    Speed: 2928.9mph
    Angle: 175.6°
    Time: 696 seconds
    Flips: 28
    Max speed: 2928.9mph
    Max height: 299886ft
    Engine used: 37 times
    Boosters used: 194 times
    https://ehmorris.com/lander/

A near-crash, way too fast

Score: 34.7 point landing Speed: 5.2mph Angle: 10.1° Time: 28 seconds Flips: 1 Max speed: 25.5mph Max height: 138ft Engine used: 16 times Boosters used: 19 times https://ehmorris.com/lander/

Sweet game!

  Near-perfect landing, super smooth

  Score: 95.5 point landing
  Speed: 1.9mph
  Angle: 0.1°
  Time: 57 seconds
  Flips: 0
  Max speed: 31.6mph
  Max height: 147ft
  Engine used: 82 times
  Boosters used: 33 times
  https://ehmorris.com/lander/

Awesome game! Really addictive :-)

  Perfect landing, incredible, you can’t get better than this

  Score: 101.1 point landing
  Speed: 0.7mph
  Angle: 0.1°
  Time: 26 seconds 
  Flips: 0
  Max speed: 32.4mph
  Max height: 194ft
  Engine used: 53 times
  Boosters used: 30 times

Give this one a go, you know you want to...

https://theintelligentbook.com/thinkingaboutprogramming/#/de...

(programmable lander)

This game is gorgeous! It would be nice if the left and right thrust controls could be swapped.

I seem to be running into a bug where the velocity gets mis-matched somehow -- the velocity will be listed as above -12 m/s even though the rocket is actually going up, which obviously makes it impossible to land.

Crashed only once, but for a good one had to practice a dozen times at least.

A good landing, keep trying

Score: 82.2 point landing

Speed: 4.3mph

Angle: 0.7°

Time: 17 seconds

Flips: 0

Max speed: 34.7mph

Max height: 210ft

Engine used: 7 times

Boosters used: 7 times

https://ehmorris.com/lander/

Here's a lunar landing copy I made 15+ years ago, Java *applet*: https://github.com/celwell/space-landing

Great game! For me, controlling the rocket was not that handy, somehow I always wanted to press the opposite button. Will be a option to swap the left and right buttons? That would be great! :)

love it!

    A good landing, keep trying
    
    Score: 83.5 point landing
    Speed: 3.8mph
    Angle: 0.8°
    Time: 44 seconds
    Flips: 0
    Max speed: 32.1mph
    Max height: 257ft
    Engine used: 25 times
    Boosters used: 19 times
    https://ehmorris.com/lander/

I enjoyed the easter eggs!

I played this game on OSX, Windows and Linux using Chrome.

The game is a lot easier and a lot more enjoyable to play on OSX. I reckon it has something to do with the input handling.

Love it. Want more. I would love to see different scenarios and, challenges. Obstacles? different gravity/planets?

I'm going to give you some feedback like your game did me: pretty bad lunar lander game, but it could be worse! Just kidding, I played it a bunch of times pretty fun.

I feel like the lunar landing aspect is incidental, and this is fundamentally a "impossible-to-please parent for whom nothing is ever good enough" simulator :-)

Nice work!

I think speed should be in ft/s to match height in ft. IIRC on Apollo they used ft/s for descent speeds. (an option for metric would be nice also)

Love it! It's like a cross between Flappy Bird and Asteroids. Nice tutorial at the beginning, too.

Just managed to get a 98.5, which I think was mostly luck.

Crashing sideways is fun, the exploded parts continue to wrap around the screen if you "land" sideways fast enough :D.

Terrible landing, you need to land slow and straight

Time: 8 seconds

Flips: 0 Max speed: 39.0mph Max height: 173ft Engine used: 2 times Boosters used: 5 times

Left and right are backwards on a phone. I'm sure I'd adapt after a few more games, but it's annoying.

Had a lot of fun

Loved the soundtrack, too! Very fitting.

The lander disappears as soon as I touch the controls and never crashes. Iceraven 1.14.0/Android 11

Had a ton of fun with this :) thanks!

Playing the lunar lander game on a Commodore PET is one of my earliest computer memories.

Way more fun if you try to see high you can get your crash score. 26.3 personal best

It seems that higher refresh rate screens make this game significantly harder..

Great game, why can't it go on all directions ? lef, right, down AND UP ?

Reminded me of a game I used to play on Miniclip called UFO Joe!

Neat, and fun!

But why does it consume 100% CPU when sitting at the results screen?

Fun. Weird that controls are reversed (left/right).

very good one! Though it wasn't completely clear to me how rating was calculated.

Awesoem job! Thanks for sharing!!

Love it, great work!

Extremly addictive p

i love the confetti/fireworks! great game

well spent 10min, this is a good game!

671 flips, lol

Good fun!

VERY FUN

great game thx