Orbit Commando

Orbit Commando is a retro style 2D space shooter featuring a cryptographically secure, onchain global leaderboard deployed to the Monad Testnet. The frontend is built with React/Vite, styled for a tactical CRT monitor aesthetic, and integrated with Wagmi/Ethers.js for seamless Web3 wallet connections. What problem does it solve? A major vulnerability in Web3 gaming is "front-door" smart contract manipulation, where bad actors bypass the game entirely and inject mathematically impossible high scores directly into the blockchain. Orbit Commando solves this using a secure Web2.5 architecture. I built a serverless Vercel API that acts as a "Referee." When a game ends, the frontend submits the score to the API, which runs a sanity check (e.g., maximum possible score over time). If the math checks out, the backend signs the payload with a private burner wallet. The Monad smart contract utilizes ecrecover to act as a cryptographic bouncer, violently rejecting any onchain transaction that lacks the official API's signature. What I learned. Engineering this required bridging the gap between modern Web2 and Web3 tooling. I learned how to resolve ESM/CommonJS module clashes between Vite and Hardhat, and how to implement onchain array sorting loops in Solidity to update the top10 leaderboard organically. I also learned how to maintain deployment pipelines during global cloud provider outages by utilizing CLI-based production pushes and .npmrc configuration overrides.