I built an orbital mechanics game with a tiny AI model inspired by NASA’s Artemis II mission
I wanted to make something that feels like learning spaceflight by playing instead of reading another wall of formulas. So I built Infinite Orbit: a browser game where you start with a few basic el...

Source: DEV Community
I wanted to make something that feels like learning spaceflight by playing instead of reading another wall of formulas. So I built Infinite Orbit: a browser game where you start with a few basic elements — Thrust, Gravity, Velocity, Angle — and combine them to discover real orbital mechanics concepts. The goal is to work your way toward an Artemis II-style Moon mission. Play it here: https://zen-antelope-infinite-orbit.cluster-se1-us.nexlayer.ai/ Repo: https://github.com/sasdeployer/infinite-orbit What made this project fun was not just the gameplay. It was the architecture. The game has 83 core orbital mechanics combinations baked in for speed and correctness, but when players try something new, it can fall back to an AI model running on Nexlayer. That means the game stays fast for the common paths, but still feels open-ended when players start experimenting. The model detail is the part I think people will find interesting: I used qwen2:0.5b. That’s a small model, and that was the po