Arcade · Orbital Ops

Orbital Ops: defend production from incoming incidents

A free sci-fi arcade game that runs in your browser. Shoot down latency spikes, memory leaks and prompt injections, survive the legacy monolith, and protect your error budget. Switch on the ambient soundtrack with the sound button.

Score0Wave0Streak×1 Error budget Best0

How to play

Move your ship with the mouse, a finger, the arrow keys or WASD. Firing is automatic, so you can focus on dodging. Every eight incidents you clear without letting one escape raises your streak multiplier, up to eight times. Each hit spends one point of your error budget; lose all three and the game ends. Press P to pause at any time.

Power-ups

Autoscale: triple shot for a few seconds.
Observability: slows incoming incidents so you can see what is happening.
Circuit breaker: a shield that absorbs one hit.
Rollback: restores one point of error budget.

Incident field guide

Every enemy is a real class of production problem. When one takes you down, the game links to how to handle it for real.

Latency spike

Fast and fragile. In production, you catch these with service level objectives and error budgets.

SLOs and error budgets →

Memory leak

Slow, tough and grows the longer you ignore it. Right-sizing workloads helps.

In-place pod resize →

Schema drift

Zigzags unpredictably, like an upstream schema nobody agreed. Contracts stop it.

Data contracts →

Traffic flood

Splits into fragments when hit. Gateways and rate limits keep floods manageable.

Inference gateways →

Prompt injection

Homes in on you, the way hostile input targets an AI agent's tools.

Prompt injection defence →

Legacy monolith

The boss every fifth wave. Heavily armoured and fires back. Decisions, not heroics, retire it.

Architecture decision records →

FAQ

Common questions

What is Orbital Ops?

A free browser arcade game on this site. You pilot a ship defending a production system from incidents such as latency spikes, memory leaks, schema drift, traffic floods and prompt injections, with a legacy monolith boss every fifth wave.

How do I play?

Move with the mouse, a finger, the arrow keys or WASD. Firing is automatic. Collect power-ups, keep your streak for a higher multiplier and protect your error budget of three hits. Press P to pause.

Does it work on phones?

Yes. It runs in any modern browser on desktop, tablet or phone, with touch controls. Nothing is installed and no account is needed; your best score is kept only in your own browser.

Is the music real?

The ambient soundtrack is generated live in your browser with the Web Audio API, so there is nothing to download. It stays off until you switch it on with the sound button.

Open to advisory, fractional CTO & select builds

Let's talk about what you're building.

The fastest route is a free 30-minute call. Prefer to write? Send a message and I'll reply personally within two business days.

Book a 30-min call → Send a message or analyse your challenge first →