Pixel Collision

[kevin]

 1. Controlling the ship is not as "smooth" as I would normally like 

Very nice Johnno, and very challenging (for me anyway).

My personal preference for controlling the ship would be to smooth out the movement, so there are less times when the vertical movement is at zero:

Code:

if lander.onPad = false   lander.vSpeed = max(lander.vSpeed + 0.01,1)

Code:

if keydown(KEY_UP) and lander.onPad = false
    lander.vSpeed = min(lander.vSpeed - 0.03,-0.2)
endif

However, this does make the challenge quite a bit easier. You may find better results by experimenting with the minimum and maximum values in the code above.

This may be just my personal preference, so feel free to ignore 

All the best - Kevin.