Orbital Panic

Orbital Panic is a one-tap arcade game: your probe auto-orbits a planet, you tap

to fling it at the next capture ring, and you keep the chain alive until you

don't. Every graphic is drawn in code, and every sound is synthesized at runtime -

there isn't a single image or audio file in the project.

v1.3.0 is the biggest update since launch. Here's what went in, and - more

interestingly - what didn't.

The Hangar

There are now four craft: Pathfinder, Dart, Hauler, and Ringed

Probe. Each has its own silhouette, accent colour, engine ember, thruster, and

trail. Each one even crashes with its own voice - Dart a bright fast crack,

Hauler a dark thud with a metallic clank, Ringed Probe a glassy ring.

They are 100% cosmetic. Identical physics, identical handling, identical

everything that touches your score.

That was the hard call of this release. Craft that actually handled differently

would have been more fun to build and more fun to talk about. But Orbital Panic

has one global all-time leaderboard, and the moment a craft has a mechanical

edge, that board stops measuring skill and starts measuring which craft you

unlocked. The alternative - a separate board per craft - splits a small player

base into four sparse boards and buys a permanent balancing job. So: cosmetics

only, and the rule is enforced in the code rather than in my memory. Even the FX

follow it. Each craft varies on the identity channel (hue, ember character,

flame width) while the state channel (flame timing, trail length, apparent

travel speed) is frozen across all four, so no craft can visually imply an edge

it doesn't have.

Unlocks derive from cumulative stats - career orbits, runs played, whether

you've reached the Star phase - so there's no separate unlock list to drift out

of sync with reality.

A secret with no progress bar

There's a second cosmetic in this build: the style of the capture ring itself.

You unlock the styles by playing, and there is no announcement, no progress

bar, and no list of what you haven't got yet. If you find the little orbit

button in the Hangar, you'll notice you have more options than you used to.

This is deliberate. The moment you show someone a row of locked slots with

progress bars, you've converted a discovery into a chore. I'd rather a handful of

players find it on their own than have everyone dutifully grind it.

One fairness detail even here: three ring styles that exist in the code

(`gate`, `comet`, `lock`) are excluded from the player-facing set, because they

draw marks at points where the probe can't actually land. A cosmetic that lies

to you about your aim isn't a cosmetic.

The fairness bug

An external systems review caught something I'd never have found by playing, and

it's the part of this release I most want to talk about.

Orbital Panic resolves your launch analytically at the instant you tap -

there's no per-frame collision loop; the geometry is solved once and the outcome

is known immediately. That's a good design for a precision game. But the orbit

was being advanced on the raw render delta, which meant your refresh rate

silently changed the difficulty. At 120 Hz your probe's position was sampled

twice as finely as at 60 Hz, so you got twice the aim resolution. On a

thermally-throttled 30 Hz phone, the capture window could collapse to one or two

frames.

All of those runs were being ranked against each other on one global board.

The sim now advances on a fixed 60 Hz accumulator regardless of what the

display is doing, so every device is scored on the same grid. Intake is clamped

so coming back from a backgrounded app can't spiral into a burst of catch-up

steps.

While in there, a second one: tapping during the post-capture settle used to set

a sticky flag with no expiry, which would auto-fire your shot a fraction of a

second later at an angle you never chose. An invisible cause of death - you'd

watch a launch you didn't aim. It's now a real 0.15 s expiring buffer: a fumbled

early tap is cleanly dropped, a late deliberate one still registers.

Neither of these is a feature. Both make the game fairer, and one of them was

quietly poisoning the leaderboard.

Feel

Capture hitstop now scales continuously with how well you hit - about 0.02 s for

a scrape along the edge of the band, up to 0.10 s dead-centre - so your hand

feels the grade before your eyes read it. Crashes get their own brief impact

freeze before the flash and shake land. Total freeze is capped per second so a

fast chain doesn't turn into a stutter.

Numbers

271 automated tests, all green. Still zero external assets. Still no ads and no

in-app purchases.

If you play it, I'd genuinely like to know where your run falls apart, for most

people it's the Star phase, and I'm not sure yet whether that's the right place

for the wall to be.