A neon physics runner across twenty worlds with shifting gravity.
Roll. Jump. Survive. Live at 5432wire.com/orbital.
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ORBITAL is the web-native rebirth of the original Unity Rolla-Ball-Game (preserved on the legacy/unity branch). One ball, twenty hand-authored worlds across two acts, and a physics engine (Rapier, compiled to WASM) that changes the rules of the universe under you - gravity, friction, damping, and drag all shift per world.
It ships as a route inside the 5432wire frontend (frontend/app/orbital), deployed to S3 + CloudFront, with progress persisted to the site's FastAPI/RDS backend over AWS Cognito auth. This repo is the game's brand home and canonical source mirror.
Act I teaches the fundamentals one mechanic at a time; Act II remixes everything with longer tracks and three new power-ups (PHASE, DASH, ECHO) on top of Act I's BOOST/SHIELD/MAGNET/SLOW-MO/GRAV-ANCHOR.
| # | World | Gravity | The twist |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | GRID ZERO | 9.8 | Baseline Earth. Tutorial construct. |
| 02 | DUNE SEA | 9.8 | Sand drag kills momentum; wind shoves sideways. |
| 03 | NEON CITY | 9.8 | Rooftop gaps, traffic platforms, thin beams. |
| 04 | TIDE BREAK | 7.8 | Floaty arcs; water drag pools kill momentum; geysers launch you mid-air. |
| 05 | SUMMIT PASS | 8.6 | Thin air, ice sheets, crumbling tiles. |
| 06 | VOID STATION | 3.2 | LOW-G. Mega jumps, inertia is king. |
| 07 | MAGMA RIFT | 9.8 | Lava kills. Geysers launch you. Basalt collapses. |
| 08 | CRYO DRIFT | 9.8 | Near-zero friction. Steering, not stopping. |
| 09 | OVERGROWTH | 9.8 | Bounce ecology, pendulum vines, half-pipes. |
| 10 | THE CORE | 3.2 ⇄ 12 | Gravity SHIFT zones. Everything, everywhere. |
| # | World | Gravity | The twist |
|---|---|---|---|
| 11 | MIRROR MERE | 9.5 | Timing trial: beat-synced gates, spinning rings. PHASE ghosts through hazards. |
| 12 | STORM SPIRE | 10.4 | Conveyors shove you forward; crosswinds never stop; heavy air shortens jumps. |
| 13 | CHROME YARD | 9.8 | Crushers on a brutal clock, tipping seesaws. DASH punches through closing gaps. |
| 14 | GLASS BLOOM | 8.9 | Portal pairs, slick glass decks. ECHO pulls shards from a wide radius. |
| 15 | SILENT ABYSS | 14.2 | Crush gravity, drag pools, narrow decks - short jumps, hard landings. |
| 16 | CLOCKWORK VEIL | 9.8 | Interlocking gates, rings, and crushers on one rhythm. PHASE covers one mistake. |
| 17 | PRISM FALL | 5.4 | Long low-g hangs over wide voids. DASH and portals are the only bridges. |
| 18 | SOLAR FORGE | 11.2 | Lava, stacked crushers and hazards. SHIELD buys a mistake, conveyors feed the fire. |
| 19 | NULL SIGNAL | 2.6 | Near-void gravity, ring gates, laser fences. ANCHOR, PHASE, and DASH all in play. |
| 20 | EVENT HORIZON | 2.8 ⇄ 15 | Finale: gravity flips without warning, every mechanic and power-up at once. |
Every world opens with a cinematic flythrough + terrain/gravity briefing, and ends in a slow-mo orbit with your stats: time vs par, deaths, shards.
Desktop - WASD / arrows to roll (hold longer = faster, release to coast, pull back to brake), SPACE to jump, ESC/P to pause.
Mobile - two modes, your choice, persisted per device:
- TILT (default): gyro zeroed at countdown. Tilt left/right steers, tilt forward accelerates, tilt back brakes. Tap anywhere = jump. Android works instantly; iOS gets a one-tap motion permission.
- EDGE CONTROLS: hold the screen edges -
TOPgas,BOTTOMbrake, longLEFT/RIGHTstrips steer. Tap anywhere = jump. The center of the screen stays 100% track.
- Realistic physics - Rapier rigid-body sim at a fixed 60Hz: rolling friction, restitution, kinematic obstacles with true contact velocities, sensor-driven events.
- Checkpoints - glow gates every few segments. Respawn is instant, but the timer never stops and deaths go on your record.
- Power-ups - BOOST, SHIELD, MAGNET, SLOW-MO, GRAV-ANCHOR (Act I), plus PHASE, DASH, ECHO (Act II) - placed before the obstacle that needs them.
- Shards - optional collectibles on risky lines for bragging rights.
- RANDOM RUN - endless login-only mode: a seeded generator stitches segment templates into a track at a random world with random difficulty. Never the same twice.
- Progression - 20-level campaign (Act I + Act II) unlocks sequentially; per-level best times, deaths, and shards, plus random-run counts and best times, sync to your account and follow you across devices.
src/ The game module (mirrors frontend/app/orbital in 5432wire)
engine/ renderer, physics, camera, input, particles, audio, quality
game/ biomes, levels, segments, obstacles, track, generator, save
ui/ HUD, briefing, menus, level select, edge controls
routes/ React Router 7 route files (lobby + game host)
React Router 7 (S3 + CloudFront)
└─ /orbital lobby: level select + random run (Cognito-gated)
└─ /orbital/play canvas host, lazy-loads the engine
└─ three.js render + Rapier WASM physics (fixed 60Hz)
└─ events → React HUD/menus
FastAPI (ECS Fargate)
└─ GET/PUT /api/v1/game/progress → RDS Postgres game_progress
No dedicated game infrastructure: the game rides the existing frontend build and backend service.
The game lives and runs inside the 5432wire monorepo - see the 5432wire repo for the full stack.
cd frontend && npm install && npm run dev
# http://localhost:3000/orbitalBug reports, level ideas, and PRs are welcome. This repo is a source mirror (no build/test tooling lives here) - see CONTRIBUTING.md for dev setup, how to verify a change, code style, and the PR process.
MIT - see LICENSE.
ORBITAL · a 5432wire production · one ball, twenty worlds, no mercy