Asteroidal Lander

A game inspired by Lunar Lander, but with Newtonian gravity and my best attempt at rigid-body physics.

You can play the game here.

Gameplay Instructions

Left/Right arrows: hold to fire turning thrusters
Down: hold to automatically slow your rotation
Up: hold to fire the main engine
Spacebar: hold to speed up time

WASD can be used in place of the arrow keys if desired.

Your goal is to land on the magenta-colored areas of the asteroid. You can see them all on the map in the bottom right of the screen. The map also shows your position relative to the asteroid as a blue icon. You might want to use the spacebar to speed up time until you get close to where you want to land.

The main display shows your ship, and will automatically zoom as you get closer/farther from the asteroid. The camera is fixed to the ship, and will rotate as you move around the asteroid so that the asteroid always appears at the bottom of the screen. A velocity indicator appears next to the ship, showing the direction of your velocity. Pointing the ship opposite to the velocity and firing the main engine will allow you to cancel out the orbital velocity and land.

Good luck, keep an eye on your fuel level (upper left), and try not to crash. This isn't some dinky little landing module, it's a massive colony ship!

Development

To live-code Asteroidal Lander, you can use the npm run live command:

$ git clone https://github.com/benburrill/asteroidal-lander
$ cd asteroidal-lander
$ npm install
$ npm run live

Then navigate to the link it prints out in your browser

If you want to build Asteroidal Lander, you can use npm run build instead. This will produce an minified JavaScript file and source map in static/build.

Deploy process:

To update the gh-pages branch, I use some arcane git trickery. The gh-pages branch consists of everything in the static/ directory (including the generated build files that are .gitignore'd by the master branch). The gh-pages branch was created as an orphan branch, which means it has no history prior to the first commit to the branch (use the --orphan flag with git checkout when creating it for the first time)

New releases can be committed to gh-pages as follows:

npm run build
git symbolic-ref HEAD refs/heads/gh-pages
git --work-tree static/ add --all && git --work-tree static/ commit
git symbolic-ref HEAD refs/heads/master && git reset

I based this technique off of X1011/git-directory-deploy. If you prefer, you can use that script rather than doing the commands yourself. The script has some additional features as well.