Carl's Lander

I've always loved landing games. That feeling of fighting gravity with a tiny thruster, watching your fuel drop, trying to set down gently on a platform the size of a postage stamp. I wanted to build one. A real one. With physics that feel right. It took a while.

There are five worlds. You start on the Moon. Grey craters. Quiet. Simple. Land enough times and you unlock Mars. Then an ice world. Then a volcanic planet where the ground erupts underneath you. Then deep space, which is just stars and silence and tiny landing pads. Each world has its own sky, its own terrain, its own weather. The volcanic one has lava. I spent a whole weekend on the lava glow. My wife asked if I was okay. I said I was working on magma. She did not find that reassuring.

Three game modes. Classic starts friendly and gets mean. Wind shows up at level three. Asteroids at level five. They home in on you. Slowly. Just enough to make you nervous. Zen mode gives you infinite fuel, no asteroids, and low gravity. It's for when you want to float around and relax. Hardcore mode gives you one life. One. Wind from the start. Asteroids from the start. I've beaten level four on Hardcore. Once. I don't want to talk about how many times I didn't.

Here's the part that makes me proudest. There are no images in this game. No audio files. Nothing. Every star, every mountain, every particle effect is drawn with math. Every sound is synthesized in real time. The thruster hiss. The landing chime. The explosion. All of it is your browser doing math really fast. I guess you could say the whole game is just... calculated. The combo system is my favorite mechanic. Land cleanly and your multiplier goes up. Keep landing cleanly and it keeps climbing. Miss one and it resets. It's that simple tension that keeps me hitting one more level at midnight.