Proto Orbits
Free · play online in your browser, no download
A solo card game about the life of a planetary system: gather dust into planets, add moons, start life and keep it alive before the star changes, swells or dies.
Official site deadpixstudios.itch.io, verified Nov 3, 2026. Linked from the developer's own Reddit post on r/aigamedev.
Where to play
Every platform this game is on. Links are checked against official sources; we never host or mirror games.
- Play free — itch.ioitch.ioReleased · Version 0.2.0Free
Plays in the browser on itch.io. No download.
Browser (no download) · Official link verified Nov 3, 2026.
About Proto Orbits
A free solo card game in the browser about building a planetary system over the life of a star. You start with a young star, a cloud of dust and a hand of cards, and drag cards onto orbits to gather dust into planetesimals, grow them into rocky worlds and giants, capture moons and bring life into being. Matter, Gas and Energy reset every turn, so each turn is a small puzzle; heavy planets push stress onto neighbouring orbits and unstable worlds collide, giants can shield inner planets, and threats such as comets, rogue planets, passing stars and solar flares are announced two turns ahead. Each of the eight star types has its own timeline: a Sun-like star becomes a red giant, a massive star ends in a supernova, a binary has two habitable zones and a pulsar sweeps the system with radiation. There is a 40-stage campaign in eight chapters, daily and weekly challenges with shared seeds, custom 20-card decks, a shop, Ascension levels, 90 achievements and a tutorial. The developer, deadpixstudios, says it is based on their own tabletop board game project; they did the design and the playtesting, and Claude Code wrote almost all of the code, with a bot that plays 30 games per star after every change. Plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript. In English and Brazilian Portuguese.
How it was built
Partially verifiedIn a post on r/aigamedev (7 Nov 2026, UTC) the developer writes: “I did the design and the playtesting, and Claude Code wrote almost all of the code.” The developer keeps a project_context.md file with the current rules, a file map, the architecture, open issues and only the last five changes, and starts every new chat with the same prompt to read it and list pending items; cutting the file down from a full history was, per the developer, the best change made. After every change a bot plays 30 games per star and reports average scores, a solver finds a 3-star solution for each campaign level and the tests replay those solutions. Written rules (no scrolling anywhere, test in the browser, back up files before big changes, only build the .exe when asked) stop the agent from changing things it was not asked to touch; fitting the interface to the pixel took many rounds of headless Chrome screenshots, and game feel and difficulty came down to the developer playing.
- Developeritch.io AI disclosure: AI Assisted, Code, with the note “AI helped to bring the physical prototype of my tabletop board game ‘Proto Orbits’ to life. All mechanics, campaign mode, archivist texts and etc were made by me, a human being.” — itch.io
Plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript with no framework and no build step; the browser version loads a boot script and seven game scripts. The developer designed the rules (based on their tabletop board game) and wrote the campaign and Archivist texts; Claude Code wrote almost all of the code, guided by a short project-context file. Balance is checked by a bot that plays 30 games per star after each change, and a solver stores a 3-star solution for each campaign level that the tests replay. The developer says it also ships as a Windows .exe built with Electron.
- Engine / framework
- None (vanilla JavaScript)
- Languages
- JavaScript
- Team size
- Not disclosed
- Development time
- Not disclosed
- Development cost
- Not disclosed
- AI-written code
- Not disclosed
“I did the design and the playtesting, and Claude Code wrote almost all of the code.”- I made a solo card game about building a planetary system with Claude Code (r/aigamedev)
- Proto Orbits: a free card game about the life of a planetary system (itch.io devlog)
Verification notes: AI use and workflow from the developer's post by u/wendeoo on r/aigamedev (7 Nov 2026, 21:54 UTC), read from the Arctic Shift Reddit archive on 8 Nov 2026 (no replies archived yet); the post links the itch.io page. Features, star types, content, languages and the AI disclosure from the itch.io page and its first devlog (7 Nov 2026, 15:21 UTC), re-read on 8 Nov 2026; itch.io gives the publication time as 7 Nov 2026, 15:33 UTC. “Almost all of the code” is not given as a number, so no AI code share is recorded. The post says “a solo card game” (one player); it does not say how many people make it, so no team size is recorded. The Windows .exe the post mentions was not offered on the itch.io page. The post says the mechanics were inspired by rule-heavy games such as the Civilization and Victoria series (the developer's comparison). The browser build's eight scripts were fetched and contain no external web addresses, so the game does not call AI services. The game was not played.
Development history
Version 0.2.0 is published on itch.io as a free browser game (15:33 UTC).
The developer shares the game on r/aigamedev, saying Claude Code wrote almost all of the code.
DeveloperReddit (u/wendeoo)
Game performance
Each figure measures something different — concurrent players, owners, downloads and sales are never interchangeable and are never added together. Labels show where each number comes from.
itch.io
Free in the browser on itch.io. The developer's post also mentions a Windows .exe (Electron), which the itch.io page did not offer on 8 Nov 2026.
Not publicly available: itch.io rating, Gross revenue.
Reviews & rankings
Not yet reviewed by our editors.
Not currently ranked.
Sources
| Source | Type | Published | Accessed |
|---|---|---|---|
| I made a solo card game about building a planetary system with Claude Code. Keeping the AI's memory was harder than anything else (r/aigamedev) Reddit (u/wendeoo) | Social post | Nov 7, 2026 | Nov 3, 2026 |
| Proto Orbits by deadpixstudios itch.io | Store page | Nov 7, 2026 | Nov 3, 2026 |
| Proto Orbits - A free card game about the life of a planetary system itch.io (deadpixstudios) | Devlog | Nov 7, 2026 | Nov 3, 2026 |
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