Watts Ahead

What is this?

A 2D isometric, turn-based management game. You run a small electrical grid across some days.

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How to play

Building a generator

1. Click a generator in the right-hand palette to select it. The button stays pressed so you can see what is selected. Click it again to deselect.
2. Move your mouse over the board. A translucent, slowly pulsing copy of that generator appears on the tile under your cursor, so you can see how it will look before you commit. The tile is outlined white if you can build there and red if you cannot.
3. Left click the tile to build. That costs one action.

Terrain decides what is allowed. Plains take anything, mountains take windmills. Water, trees and the ground under a city take nothing at all, for now.

Removing a generator

• Left click any generator standing on the board to remove it. (Right click does the same thing, so a misclick with a generator selected is never ambiguous.)
• Removing one you placed on this same day is free — you get the action back. It is an undo, and it works even when you have zero actions left.
• Removing an older generator — one from a previous day — costs one action. So relocating a generator across days costs two: one to take it down, one to put it back up.

Taking the whole day back

Replan Day puts the board and your actions back exactly as they were at the start of today. It is greyed out when there is nothing to undo. It does not move the day, the battery, or anything already resolved — it just lets you start this day’s thinking over.

Looking ahead

The forecast panel has a button for each of the next few days, named after the day itself. Click one and the weather on the board and the three bars switch to that day. Use it to spot the windless Thursday before it arrives and move a generator in time.

It is a preview only. End Day always resolves the day you are actually on, and the bottom strip never leaves it.

Ending the day

End Day resolves everything: your generators produce, your cities draw, and the day is scored. Then a new day begins with a fresh three actions.

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The rules that will catch you out

Weather is per tile, not per level. A cloud sits on specific tiles. A solar panel under that cloud makes nothing while one two tiles away makes full power. Read the board, not just the day.

Generator	Makes	When
Solar panel	1	there is no cloud on its tile — nothing under cloud
Windmill	2	there is wind on its tile — nothing without it

Too little power and a city goes dark. The grid drops the cheapest set that closes the gap, which means a big city can go out while a small one stays lit.

Too much power is also a failure. Surplus goes into your battery, but once that is full the surge has to go somewhere — and it trips a city offline. On these small grids, overbuilding is as dangerous as underbuilding.

A blackout costs you the next day too. A city that goes dark stays dark the following day, drawing nothing and lighting nothing. It only comes back after a day that resolves cleanly.

A day you cannot cover spends everything you have, battery included. Falling short does not just cost you a city — it empties your reserve as well.

Lose the capital and you lose the run. It is the city you cannot afford to drop.

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This is a prototype

I am putting this up specifically to find out whether the idea is worth building.

What is here: five short levels that introduce one thing at a time — a single generator type, then the battery, then wind — the full simulation, and an end-of-level screen.

What is not here yet: no sound, no music, no menu, no saving, and the art is almost entirely placeholder. Closing the game loses your progress.

If people like this, I will spend the next few months building it properly — more generator types, real art and sound, a longer campaign, and levels that go somewhere. If they do not, I will have learned that cheaply, which is also a good outcome.

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Tell me what you think

Two-minute feedback form → — this is the single most useful thing you can do for the game. It is short, nothing is required, and there is an optional box for your email if you want to hear when there is a new version.

The comments below work too, and I read all of them.

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Built with

Godot 4.7.