Current Crisis is a power grid construction and management simulator game made in Unity sponsored by Sandia National Laboratories, and a project I have worked on since January 2024 for my junior year of undergraduate study at Georgia Tech, continuing to this day.

Current Crisis is a game focused on power grid management, where you take on the combined role of both a power utility company and transmission system operator. In this role, gameplay involves balancing the costs of running a power grid utility company and maintaining a high power system reliability, even in the case of extreme weather events such as hurricanes or extreme events such as wildfires caused by the inherent risk of power grid operations.

As an Implementation Student Team lead on the project, I led a team of eleven developing an economic system in the game, where cities naturally grow in population over time and demand power from the player: if power demand is met, the player is rewarded profit based on the amount of electricity used, or punished with a city losing “happiness”, a resource which can end your game if low enough. The following semester I co-led a team of ten balancing the gameplay, including power rates, building construction costs, and maintenance costs to be as realistic as possible to real life situations, yet not too punishing to a player’s enjoyment.

I am currently still involved in the project as a part-time gameplay programmer, contributing primarily to developing boilerplate for future systems.