CrankLander

Crank the lander. Feather the engine. Touch down softly.

CrankLander is a crank-powered lunar landing game built for Playdate. Turn the crank to rotate your tiny craft, hold A to fire the engine, and bring every footpad down inside the lights without spending the fuel you need to get there. Twelve hand-authored descents carry you from the wide calm of First Light to a final narrow shelf in Aitken Basin. The Moon is quiet. Your telemetry is not.

Features

• Crank-driven attitude control -- one-to-one rotation puts the lander's angle in your wrist, the way Playdate was meant to be played
• Twelve authored missions -- ridges, craters, high shelves, relay masts, deep basins, and increasingly scarce fuel
• Honest lunar physics -- gravity, momentum, thrust, and terrain collision run on a fixed deterministic simulation
• A visible safe envelope -- horizontal speed, vertical speed, and attitude are always readable in the telemetry strip
• Bronze, silver, and gold landings -- scores reward fuel, softness, stability, attitude, and pad accuracy
• Persistent mission log -- missions unlock in sequence and your best medal, score, and fuel are saved
• Clean 1-bit aesthetic designed for Playdate's crisp black-and-white screen

Controls

• Crank: Rotate the lander
• D-pad Left/Right: Rotate (alternative)
• A button: Fire the engine / confirm
• B button: Retry / go back on menus

Credits

CrankLander is an original Playdate game, made as an homage to the long lineage of lunar landing games -- from Jim Storer's 1969 mainframe simulation to Atari's vector arcade cabinet Lunar Lander (Atari, 1979). Where the cabinet gave you a throttle lever, the crank here gives you the one thing a lever never could: continuous, one-to-one control of which way the ship is pointing. All code, levels, sound, and artwork are original.

How to Install on Playdate

1. Download the .pdx.zip file from this page
2. Go to play.date/account/sideload in your browser
3. Sign in with your Playdate account
4. Upload the .pdx.zip file
5. The game will appear on your Playdate!

Requires a Playdate console to play.