Moon Lander

About the game

You control a small rocket falling toward a rocky moon, with the planet hanging in the sky behind it. The goal is to touch down on the glowing pad, upright and slowly. Land too fast or tilted and the rocket crashes.

You can rotate the rocket and fire the main thruster, which uses fuel. A panel in the corner shows your altitude, fuel, speed and tilt. A soft landing earns bonus points, and so does leftover fuel. With each level the pad gets smaller and the fuel tank gets smaller too, so the game is a steady lesson in using as little thrust as possible.

The terrain is a smooth rolling surface generated for each level. Your best score is saved in the browser.

Playing it here

Click Play and the game opens on its title screen. Press Play there to start. The sound can be turned off with the speaker icon in the corner, and the game also has a fullscreen button.

Controls

Left / Right to rotate, Up or Space to fire the thruster.

A few things worth knowing

Kill sideways speed early. Drift is the usual cause of a miss; fix it high up, where there is time.

Use short bursts. Long burns waste fuel and make it hard to judge your speed.

FAQ

Can I play on a phone? Yes, there are on-screen touch controls.

Credits and licence

Moon Lander is one of the games in LittleJS Arcade by Frank Force, and it runs on his LittleJS engine. Both are released under the MIT licence; the licence text is linked from this page. The collection's repository includes notes for AI coding assistants, so the code was written at least in part with AI help. The graphics are drawn by the code and the sounds are synthesised, so the game loads no image or audio files. The source code is on GitHub.