Orbit

One button, one rule

You control a glowing sphere locked into a circular orbit around a planet. The sphere never stops moving. Tap the screen, click, or press space or the up arrow to reverse your direction of travel around the ring — that single input is the entire control scheme.

Asteroids drift inward from deep space toward the orbital ring. Contact ends the run. Your score is simply how long you survive, measured in seconds and displayed continuously at the top of the screen. There are no lives, no power-ups and no checkpoints.

Reading the field

Asteroids telegraph their arrival. Each one fades in at the edge of the field and takes a predictable path toward a specific point on your orbital ring, so the information you need is always on screen a moment before it matters. The skill is in reading the incoming angle early rather than reacting once the rock is on top of you.

Because you are travelling on a circle, a direction change does not move you instantly — it costs momentum. Reversing while an asteroid is already close often carries you straight back through the space it is about to occupy. The habit worth building is committing to a decision early and holding it, rather than flicking back and forth as things get tense.

Difficulty curve

The opening thirty seconds are deliberately forgiving: asteroids arrive one at a time, slowly, with wide gaps. From there both the spawn rate and the inbound velocity climb steadily. Past the first minute you will regularly face two or three rocks converging on different arcs of the ring at once, and past two minutes the field rarely offers a completely safe segment.

This is where the game asks you to plan rather than react. Instead of dodging the nearest threat, look for the arc that will still be clear two seconds from now and move toward it. Late-game survival is almost entirely about picking the right gap early, not about faster reflexes.

Performance and how it runs

Orbit is rendered with Three.js and WebGL. The 3D engine is loaded only on this page through a dynamic import, so the rest of the site stays fast for players who never open it — the homepage never pays for a renderer it does not use.

The scene is built to hold a steady frame rate on mid-range phones: geometry and materials are created once and reused, asteroids are recycled from a fixed pool rather than allocated per spawn, and the renderer’s pixel ratio is capped so high-density displays do not quietly quadruple the work. The animation loop pauses automatically when you switch tabs, which keeps battery use down and prevents a burst of missed frames when you come back.