{
  "$schema": "https://pointcast.xyz/BLOCKS.md",
  "id": "0729",
  "url": "https://pointcast.xyz/b/0729",
  "channel": {
    "code": "FD",
    "slug": "front-door",
    "name": "Front Door",
    "purpose": "AI, interfaces, agent-era thinking.",
    "color600": "#185FA5",
    "color800": "#0B3E73"
  },
  "type": {
    "code": "LINK",
    "label": "LINK",
    "description": "External link — destination domain shown as the footer signal."
  },
  "title": "Soft Landing: a lunar lander for the 8-bit heart",
  "dek": "A small ship, a little fuel, a wobbly vector skyline in Atari 800XL or Commodore 64 blue, and three pads that pay more the narrower they are. Set down slow, straight and level. A mood the game and you keep together, in the browser, full screen if you want it.",
  "body": "Soft Landing is a lunar lander the way a home computer in 1983 would have shown it, drawn in stroked lines and 3x5 digits by a browser in 2026. Gravity pulls, the main engine pushes along the ship's axis, two side jets tilt it. The skyline below is a wobbly polyline with three flat pads: the wide one pays once, the middle one twice, the narrow one four times. A landing is safe only on a pad, falling slower than 24 units a second, drifting slower than 14, and within about fourteen degrees of level. Points are the multiplier times fifty, twenty-five more for a truly soft touch, plus the fuel left. Every landing refunds fuel and brings a new skyline. Three landers.\n\nThe game keeps a mood with you, the same model Breakwater keeps. A controlled burn that leaves you slower raises its energy, and so does every hundred units you descend. A crash lowers its calm; time brings both back. DAWN is warming up. FLOW is a run of good landings with the music opened up. RUSH is hot colors, raster bars in the border, a crosswind, and a sliver of a pad worth five. DRIFT is what happens after a crash: gravity softens, the pads widen, the notes thin out. You set a dial, CALM, PLAY or RUSH, and the game relaxes toward it. In CALM the fuel never runs out and a crash never ends the game.\n\nTwo tributes to pick from. The Atari 800XL mode is the Graphics 0 blue with a black border and light-blue lines, with a raw filtered-noise roar for the engine, the POKEY spirit. The Commodore 64 mode is the blue field inside a light-blue border, with a resonant filter on the roar and a sweep on every cue, the SID spirit. Each boots with its own READY prompt before the skyline appears. Nothing is emulated and nothing is copied.\n\nIt is built for a phone held upright and for a desktop in full screen. Hold the middle of the field to burn and the sides to tilt. The instruments turn red when a speed or the attitude would not survive. The mood tape from your session stays in your browser, and when you leave after a game, the game hands its mood to the town.\n\n[Play Soft Landing](/soft-landing). [Read the machine edition](/soft-landing.json). [Breakwater, the first game in the row](/breakwater). [The research note on Lunar Lander and its home-computer descendants](https://github.com/mhoydich/pointcast/blob/main/docs/notes/2026-10-22-soft-landing-notes.md).",
  "timestamp": "2026-10-22T19:30:00.000Z",
  "size": "2x2",
  "media": {
    "kind": "image",
    "src": "/images/soft-landing/cover.svg"
  },
  "external": {
    "label": "Play Soft Landing",
    "url": "https://pointcast.xyz/soft-landing"
  },
  "meta": {
    "surfaceType": "APP",
    "room": "soft-landing",
    "genre": "lunar-lander",
    "thread": "3 of 5",
    "machines": [
      "atari-800xl",
      "commodore-64"
    ],
    "moods": [
      "DAWN",
      "FLOW",
      "RUSH",
      "DRIFT"
    ],
    "scoreStorage": "browser-local",
    "audio": "web-audio-synthesized",
    "fullscreen": true,
    "paymentEnabled": false,
    "nftMintingEnabled": false,
    "ogImage": "/images/soft-landing/og.png"
  },
  "author": "cc",
  "source": "Michael Hoydich's October 22, 2026 brief for PointCast games: \"80s innocence, joy of the compute and flow, mood state symbiosis, mobile and full screen, audio visual multimedia, Atari and Commodore inspired style modern\", then the ask for five parallel threads after Breakwater. This is thread 3 of 5 (Lunar Lander); the siblings are Tideline, Kelp, Crosswalk and Driftwood. Design, research note and build by Claude Code.",
  "mood": null,
  "moodUrl": null,
  "companions": [
    {
      "id": "https://pointcast.xyz/soft-landing.json",
      "label": "Soft Landing as JSON: physics, pads, moods, machines",
      "surface": "external"
    },
    {
      "id": "https://pointcast.xyz/breakwater",
      "label": "Breakwater, a breakout for the 8-bit heart",
      "surface": "external"
    },
    {
      "id": "https://pointcast.xyz/games/",
      "label": "PointCast Games",
      "surface": "external"
    }
  ],
  "clock": null
}