release notes ·

Grid Town v0.1 — Release Notes

A daily newspaper, a rebuilt supply-and-demand graph, full mobile play, seasons — and a win condition that finally means what it says.

The Gazette — your daily paper

  • A front page every dawn — the day and night just past are recapped as a vintage newspaper, The [Town] Gazette, with a headline that fits what happened and a scannable stats ledger.
  • The paper reads your day — a blackout leads with a crisis headline and a dark sidebar; a clean day runs a good-news box; a quiet day keeps it short.
  • A consultant's ledger calls out the moves you missed — where you left megawatts or money on the table.
  • A post-mortem on defeat names the decisive turn: "Day 3 — upkeep passed income."

The Board — one supply & demand graph

  • An adequacy ribbon runs across the top — green when you're covered, amber when gas is carrying it, red when you're short — past and future alike, so "am I about to be short?" is a one-second read.
  • The source mix, ElectricityMaps-style — a stacked area shows exactly which sources meet demand, in real time and across the whole day.
  • A forecast that's honest about certainty — precise for the next few hours, then widening into an uncertainty cone toward dawn ("exact soon, fuzzy later"), and it flags the worst moment ("short 6 MW @ 19h") before it lands.

Mobile

  • Full touch play — drag to pan, pinch to zoom, tap to inspect, a touch build flow with confirm chips, and a portrait HUD.
  • A performance watchdog quietly trims effects to keep it smooth on lower-end phones.

Sound

  • A dawn cheer rewards a clean night survived.

Balance & fairness

  • Honest victory — a Sustainable City now has to cover its own peak from firm power (nuclear, batteries, or a gas reserve), so you can't "win" a wind-only grid that a windless night would black out.
  • A won city can still lose — keep playing after your win and a pollution-cap or bankruptcy failure still ends the run. Winning is a milestone, not immunity.

Controls & UI

  • Inspect mode on A — press A (or Esc / right-click) to drop your tool so a click inspects anything; the build guide shows your current mode.
  • Pause is planning mode — pausing is framed as permission to stop and think, not a break in play.
  • The strip answers first — a TONIGHT read tells you how short you'll be and the cheapest fix, with a firm-vs-peak gauge.
  • Name your town, and named families move into your houses.

Fixes

  • Building on a tree or rock now clears it.
  • The pollution readout no longer says "clean" while a gas plant is burning — it tells you honestly when emissions are being absorbed by natural dispersal versus rising toward the cap.
  • Assorted usability fixes — demolish confirmation, HUD clipping at narrow widths, and forecast rendering across the midnight boundary.

Play the alpha at gridtown.vercel.app, or read about the game.