electrobillion is an educational city-building simulation about the infrastructure, economics, and environmental consequences of electricity. You run the power company for a growing island city: construct generating capacity, connect substations and transmission lines, and keep supply and demand in balance as the city develops around you.
The aim is to make the machinery behind a light switch understandable without flattening it into a single resource bar. The grid, electricity market, company finances, weather, pollution, and the city’s residential, commercial, industrial, and agricultural zones all affect one another.
What you manage
- Power infrastructure: build wind, solar, fossil generation, and storage, then connect it through substations and transmission lines.
- A changing market: settle supply and demand in real time while managing costs, revenue, dynamic prices, and subsidies.
- Autonomous city growth: provide enough reliable electricity for neighbourhoods and businesses with different demand patterns to develop.
- Environmental trade-offs: see how generation choices affect pollution and the natural world, and use technological and natural tools to limit the damage.
- Time and weather: respond to day-and-night demand, changing solar and wind output, seasonal conditions, and extreme events.
Play now
electrobillion is available on Steam and for iPhone and iPad on the App Store. The earlier web alpha remains playable on itch.io.
From web prototype to native game
Development began in April 2024. The first version grew out of the Rust and WebAssembly foundation I built for Maginet, using wasm-bindgen, Canvas2D, and later WebGL in the browser.
As the simulation became more ambitious, I moved the current game to a native Rust client using wgpu for GPU rendering and Skia through skia-safe for vector graphics and interface rendering. That architecture supports the denser grid, market, city, weather, and environmental simulation while sharing the same core across platforms.
The longer development overview follows that process from the earliest power-grid prototype through the native release. The official project site has the current factsheet, screenshots, trailer, and contact details.
- Developing electrobillion, an educational power grid simulator
Micro-toy to mega-project, many lessons in this one!
2026-07-01 by Evrim Öztamur