electrobillion is a city builder simulation game in which you take charge of the power infrastructure for a growing island micronation, far into the near future. As the local grid operator, your task is to make sure that the city can flourish relentlessly.
You can construct various types of green and dirty energy sources, wire the power transmission infrastructure, balance the supply and demand, make (or lose) a lot money!
As the city grows on its own, it consults you with its expansion plans. Your goal is to make sure that you not only provide stable electricity to its denizens, but also prevent catastrophe that may come at a loss of power.
I decided to start building my second game after Maginet following a bout of climate anxiety, digging around to learn more about what our major challenges are with respect to the upcoming energy transition. What I found out was the inner workings of the largest and most complex machinery that humanity has ever built, and the interconnected nature of endless piles of systems.
electrobillion tries to bring the major components of our power infrastructure and package it all together in a fun and educational game.
Play now
It’s been under development since April 2024, and went through two major development stages: alpha and beta.
electrobillion alpha is available for free on itch.io and can be played on a web browser or on your phone. It’s got all the basic features, but not the top-notch polish of the beta.
electrobillion beta is available on Steam (Windows, Linux, Mac) and iOS. It is a lot more advanced, fun, and complete than the alpha.
Development
Both versions are developed with Rust completely. The alpha uses wasm-bindgen to run on platforms supporting HTML5, whereas the beta uses wgpu-rs (WebGPU to replace WebGL2) and skia-safe (Skia to replace HTML5 Canvas) and runs natively on all supported platforms.
As a little series on game development with this stack, I will be writing technical articles discussing various aspects of it, such as working with Rust, maturity of the ecosystem, and challenges in developing a more complex second game project after Maginet.
- Developing electrobillion, an educational power grid simulator
Micro-toy to mega-project, many lessons in this one!
2026-07-01 by Evrim Öztamur