Moon Lander

Bring the gold lander down soft on a lit pad. Fuel is short, harder pads pay more, and every level pulls a little harder.

Panels: 52x16 and 32x8 · Opened from the clock's menu, not the rotation · Three landers per game

The game

You drop onto a new stretch of moon each level, with a fixed amount of fuel and
gravity that never lets up. Touch down on a pad with both feet, slowly enough
and with hardly any sideways drift, and you score and move on. Anything else is a
crater, and a crater costs one of your three landers. After a crash you try the
same ground again, with the scorch mark left where you hit it.

The legs tell you how you are doing: they turn green while your speed is
inside the landing window, and red when you are too fast and close to the
ground.

Pads and scoring

• Green x1 is the wide, forgiving pad. Blue x2 is narrower, pink x5 is
  barely wider than the lander. On the 32x8 build the pads are told apart by
  colour alone: green is wide, pink is narrow and pays double.
• A landing scores 100 x the pad multiplier, plus 2 per unit of fuel left,
  plus 10 per level, and +100 for a perfect landing: very gentle, nearly
  still and in the middle of the pad.
• An extra lander for every 2000 points, up to five.
• Your best score is kept on the clock and shown on the title screen.

Levels

• Every level the pull of gravity grows (6% a level, capped at 50% more) and the
  fuel tank shrinks a little, down to a floor.
• Level 3: the wide x1 pad is gone.
• Level 4: a sideways wind, drawn as dust drifting across the sky.
• Level 6: you arrive already moving sideways.

Controls

On the clock:

• SELECT (tap) fires the main engine in a pulse of about half a second; three or four taps brake a normal descent
• LEFT / RIGHT (hold) fire the side thrusters; they cost a quarter of the fuel
• LEFT + RIGHT together hold the main engine on
• On the title screen LEFT and RIGHT choose START or QUIT, SELECT takes it

With a Bluetooth gamepad: A or the right trigger is the engine (the
trigger is proportional), the D-pad or left stick steers, START or A
chooses on the title screen and SELECT goes back to it. The title shows the
pad's connection state.

Leave it alone on the title screen for a few seconds and the lander flies itself
as a demo; press anything to take over. Hold SELECT on the clock to leave the
game, or choose QUIT.

Sound

The 52x16 build uses the song synthesiser: engine rumble, thruster puffs, a
low-fuel beep, a touchdown arpeggio (with a sparkle on a perfect landing), a
crash, and a short tune for a new best. Title music is optional. The 32x8 build
plays short RTTTL tunes on the buzzer instead and has no engine sound.