📋 Overview
Orbitz is a browser-based puzzle game built on gravitational physics. You launch asteroids by dragging a slingshot, and they fly through space affected by the gravitational pull of nearby masses. Each level adds complexity — more masses, tighter windows, and gravity wells that bend your trajectory in unexpected ways. The goal: hit the target in as few shots as possible (par scoring).
💡 Context
Started at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science — Graf and I saw a gravity demo and thought "this would make a sick game." Claude 3.5 Sonnet had just come out, so we used it to build the whole thing in about a week. Easy to understand, hard to master — anyone can drag and launch, but threading an asteroid through three gravity wells to bank-shot into a target takes real spatial intuition.
🛠 Tech Stack
🧠 Technical Challenges
Making the physics feel right — not just be correct — and making the visual feedback communicate gravitational forces intuitively.
The background grid showing gravitational distortion would glitch near massive objects — grid points folding over themselves and creating visual artifacts.
Clamped the grid displacement and added ghost aim lines so players can learn from their previous shots. Small tweaks, big difference in feel.
🎯 Role
Built collaboratively with Graf (Jacob Grafenstein) and Nino (Giannino Lusic). We all shared development — nobody "led" anything, we just jammed on it together using Claude 3.5 and shipped it in about a week.
✨ Key Highlights
- Gravity simulation with N-body interactions
- Distortion grid showing gravitational field strength visually
- Ghost aim lines so you can learn from previous shots
- 15 levels across multiple difficulty tiers
- Built in ~1 week with AI-assisted development