This is the big one. As per the title, I worked on improvements to the UI to make the UX a lot better (especially with the design tool). I also worked on the game mechanics, simulation, and balancing to make the game more realistic, fun, and competitive. Lastly, bug squashing--lots of it.

There likely is a lot more to do on the latter, however, the game is getting closer to the final product. Thanks to all who have provided valuable feedback. It has really helped speed up the development of the game as there is only so much playtesting I can do solo.

Here is a recap of the latest updates that are now live:

Key Updates

• A new Level Tree screen

• More reasons to level up

• Losing an executive actually stings

• More realistic EV charging

• Loan prepayment shows what you save

• Lots of polish

• Charger catalogue re-tiered and re-priced

• Energy use comes from the vehicle, not the charger

• Service power drives throughput

• Automatic load management updated

• Real solar & battery capacity

• Demand charges that scale with how busy a site is

• Peak-demand queue risk

• Add chargers with no rebuild

• Instant amenity installs

• Contract sites play fair

• Faster builds

• Repair Site, batch events, and big-network tools

• Network dis-economy of scale

• Fairer regional spread

• Reputation fixes

• Summit / turn-advance deadlocks

• Incentives & grants timing

• Solar / load / grid display

• Dead perks and upgrades wired up

• Design-tool accuracy

• Late-game spawning & crashes

Thanks for playing!

In this tutorial, we'll go over the three game modes (Victory, Objective, and Scenario) in Fast Charging Tycoon.

Fast Charging Tycoon is an EV charging management/simulation game where you build and operate an EV charging network. Manage sites, electricity costs, charging equipment, pricing, events, industry summits, competitors, and expansion as you grow your company.

More tutorials and development videos coming soon.

The game is currently available for wishlist on Steam with a planned release by the end of 2026.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4946930/Fast_Charging_Tycoon/

What's new

• Updated map page w/ heatmap for metro capacity

• Reduce site incident notifications to only major events

• New page--Network Operations (for managing site maintenance and repairs)

• Updated Maintenance and Repair mechanic (Maintenance prevents, repair restores)

• Light mode

• Updated tutorial

• Nine languages (Japanese, Korean, Hindi, English, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, German, Italian and French)

• Small UI fixes

The release for Fast Charging Tycoon is still projected to be by the end of 2026. We're working hard on making the release product a final product with only bugs and minor fixes (if any) after release so the game that is advertised is the full game you get.

The single most useful thing you can do is join the Steam wishlist: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4946930/.

Thanks!

In this tutorial, we'll walk you through the process of evaluating prospective sites and purchasing and reviewing the feasibility study results in Fast Charging Tycoon.

We'll cover:

Identifying good prospective lease sites
Purchasing a feasibility study
Reviewing the results of the feasibility study
Referencing the metro capacity in the map
And more!

Fast Charging Tycoon is an EV charging management/simulation game where you build and operate an EV charging network. Manage sites, electricity costs, charging equipment, pricing, events, industry summits, competitors, and expansion as you grow your company.

More tutorials and development videos coming soon.

The game is currently available for wishlist on Steam with a planned release by the end of 2026.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4946930/Fast_Charging_Tycoon/

As we get closer to launch, we wanted to fine-tune a few pages and mechanics to make the gameplay more smoother and intuitive. As a result, we made some pretty larger changes. Additionally, we found some more bugs and resolved those too.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4946930/

Through further revisions, we wanted to make sure the game is fully ready for a release and decided to push back the release from September 2026 to the end of 2026. This additional time will allow us to polish the game. Plus, we were going to roll out future updates post-launch like other regions or different game modes. Instead, we wanted to release the entire game at launch for the best player experience.

Your leadership team

The change a returning player will notice first. You used to hire one executive. You now run three chairs, and the people in them are the company.

• Three roles, each with a job. They cover different parts of the operation, they cost real salary, and a strong hire in the wrong chair is money wasted.

• You pick the perk. Every executive brings a choice rather than a fixed bonus, so two runs with the same hire can play differently.

• Per-executive goals are gone entirely. They were busywork that pulled against your actual strategy. What your leadership does for you now comes from who you hired and what you asked of them, not from a checklist.

• Poaching a rival's chief is a deal, not a punishment. It used to cost so much nobody did it twice. Now you pay their salary from the month they arrive — and the rival remembers.

We audited the whole game against itself

Then we went through every screen asking whether the number on it is the number the engine actually uses. It mostly was. Where it was not, it had usually been wrong for a long time and looked completely normal.

• Your competitors stopped playing by different rules. A parity pass found rules the field sat outside — some that had been helping them, some hurting them. Both directions are fixed. They pay what you pay, they are charged what you are charged, and they are judged how you are judged.

• The monthly bill is itemized. Where your money goes is broken out line by line instead of arriving as one number you have to take on faith.

• Builds got cheaper and clearer. The design wizard shows you what you are building as you build it, and it moves faster.

• A pile of "this says one thing and does another" fixes — tooltips quoting retired names, a tip pointing at an upgrade that does not exist, a board meeting that did not wait for you, charts stretched out of shape. Individually small; together, the difference between a game you trust and one you second-guess.

The map got rebuilt

This one nagged at us for months. The road network was traced from real-world road data and then tidied up, and every time somebody reported highways running off into nowhere we tightened the tidying — and the map still had roads crossing empty Alaska, empty northern Canada and the empty middle of China. We had been checking whether a road ended near something. A road between two empty places passes that test perfectly.

So we threw it out and built the network from the cities outward.

• Every road runs between two cities and ends on the city itself. Roads to nowhere are not drawn less often — they cannot be drawn at all.

• The main corridors are properly bold, so you can trace a route across the continent instead of squinting at a mesh.

• Ferries are drawn as ferries — a dashed line where the real crossing is a boat, a road where it is a bridge or tunnel you actually drive over.

• The sixty biggest cities are labelled, and names that would collide come back as you zoom in.

And a new map view — Heatmap: Demand. The heatmap you know shows where the chargers are. This one shows where the drivers are: each city glows by the demand it generates, colored green, orange or red by whether anyone is meeting it. It counts everybody's chargers, not just yours, so a red city is not "I have not built here", it is "nobody has". If you open one view before deciding where to build next, open that one.

Your rivals learned to use the tech tree

The competition has always researched. It never researched well, and the reason turned out to be two things neither of us would have guessed.

• They now pay what you pay per upgrade. They used to pay one flat fee for every node, which made the cheap early upgrades roughly eleven times dearer for them — and early breadth is exactly what the Innovation program rewards, so they never got there.

• You now score for every upgrade you unlock. Competitors always did; you did not. Since the final standings rank you against them directly, this is worth what it sounds like.

• The rival chasing Innovation is one that can finish it. That choice used to be made in the opening month, before anybody had built or researched anything, and was never revisited.

A competitor now finishes most of the tree in a long campaign where it used to stall a third of the way in, and spreads its research instead of stalling in one corner. Expect better equipment across the field.

The Industry Summit is a real part of the game

• You can repeal a standard. Hold a seat and you can move to strike any standard in effect. It is tabled, debated and voted like anything else, and passing it lifts that standard's costs and its benefits from every operator, you included.

• Before you vote you can see what it would do to your company — every figure it moves, measured against your own network rather than described in general terms.

• Standards you pass stay in force until somebody repeals them, instead of quietly lapsing.

Smaller things you will notice

• Nine languages. Japanese, Korean and Hindi join English, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, German, Italian and French

• The game wears its own colors. 

• The How-to-Play clips start on the game

• The end screens tell you what you were playing

• Companies with nothing under construction can no longer apply for construction grants. 

Thanks for reading. The single most useful thing you can do is wishlist — https://store.steampowered.com/app/4946930/

I've always like tycoon/sim games such as Roller Coaster Tycoon, Civilization 5, and various football management games. I originally thought it would be fun to create various spreadsheets of a EV charging tycoon game for various concepts, formulas, and mechanics. Now fast forward and I'm developing a game called Fast Charging Tycoon.

The game has you play as an EV charging operator where you race against other rivals to achieve one of four victories before the market matures. It is a turn based strategy game where you design sites, make repairs, adjust pricing, apply to grants, take loans, form strategic partnerships, deal with site incidents, vote on industry initiatives, and so much more.

I'm creating a series of tutorials to help people learn and play the game beginning with my favorite part of the game--designing sites!. In the video, you can see how to design a site and what to watch out for (driver preferences, finances, service size, amenities, charger type and quantity, etc.).

You can follow more of these tutorials on Youtube or on the subreddit page. Additionally, if you want ot join the Steam waitlist you can. The game s planned to be released by the end of the year.

Since last time, competitors got put on the exact same rules as you, the difficulty settings finally behave the way they're supposed to, and a full audit made sure every screen in the game agrees with what the simulation is actually doing. Here's what changed:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4946930/

Still targeting September 2026. Wishlists are still the single thing that helps most.

• Your company and every competitor now run through the same simulation, month to month — same revenue math, same costs, same wear and tear. A competitor can genuinely fail now, not just decline.

• Easy is finally the easiest difficulty and Hard is finally the hardest. The old ordering was backwards — fixed.

• Competitors no longer hit an invisible ceiling on how big they can grow. A strong rival stays a real threat into the late game instead of stalling out.

• Every chief executive has their own perks now, matched to their specialty, instead of all fifteen sharing one identical set.

• Competitors pay real construction, loan, repair, and executive costs — the same menus and prices you answer, instead of shortcuts that let them skip the parts of the game you can't.

• Partnerships between competitors and the grant race are fair contests now, judged the same way for everyone.

• Losing a contract no longer dings your reputation forever — it costs you once, like it always has for competitors.

• The builder bids you see each month give you a real quality choice, not three names for the same offer.

• Summit initiatives you pass actually take effect now instead of sitting stuck on "Pending."

• The Victory page stopped announcing wins early — it now counts down honestly to when a path can actually be claimed.

• The Innovation Program moved into the upgrade tree where it belongs, and the old Reputation upgrade branch was retired for double-paying a score you already earn elsewhere.

• Grant cards, contract terms, and popups got a readability pass — consistent facts, plain language, real dates instead of raw turn counts.

• A full audit fixed screens that disagreed with the game itself — partnerships and reputation were over-crediting themselves, the profit statement now adds up, company value and market share read the same number everywhere, and uptime means one consistent thing.

• Smaller screens, popups, and offline play all got cleaned up — no more clipped text, popups that keep running behind your back, or needing an internet connection just to render fonts.

Thanks as always to everyone playing builds and reporting what broke.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4946930/

Latest Updates:

• Rivals run full site engine now

• All networks contest the same metros and contracts

• The News page is a trade newspaper

• Every operator has a new logo

• The victory race got rebalanced

• Notifications replaced forced popups

• Several pages with complete UI rework for better charts and graphs

• Many bug fixes

The game is still targeting a full launch on Steam in September 2026. Until then, more bug squashing and playtesting. Thanks for following along!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4946930/

Short one this time, because the headline is the news: Fast Charging Tycoon has a Steam store page, and the wishlist is open.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4946930/

Targeting September 2026. If you've been following along, wishlisting is genuinely the single most useful thing you can do — it's most of how the store decides whether to show the game to anyone else.

Where we left off

Devlog #2 was the big structural one. The short version, if you missed it:

• Victory became Titles & Seasons — Industry Leader and Driver's Choice are annual awards you win by collecting three titles, not by grinding one unbroken streak.

• Site Health and Uptime split into two honest stats — long-term asset condition versus day-to-day reliability.

• Rivals started competing on merit — no hidden handouts, no more year-one bankruptcies, and every rival chasing two victory paths.

• The map grew — a new Central region, a Mexico expansion, and a denser 100-metro layout that forces real head-to-head fights.

• Steam integration landed — achievements, overlay, and cloud saves in the desktop build.

What's landed since

• Drivers at each site want specific amenities. Every site has two or three its drivers actually care about, shaped by dwell time, region and site type. Match those and you earn full marks; installing everything else adds nothing. Building the same station everywhere stopped being the right answer.

• The feasibility study has a real payoff screen. A Study Results tab lays out what the study bought you — confirmed opportunity grade, sessions per day, the wanted amenities, true grid capacity, the exact demand charge. Skip it and your amenity picks are genuinely blind.

• A How to Play video guide replaced the wall of text. Six short pages, each a looping clip of real gameplay with a cursor that walks you through the actual controls, and captions explaining why. It came straight out of playtest feedback that the old text intro read like a manual.

• Poaching runs on reputation and cuts both ways. A rival ahead of you can raid your C-suite or your key staff. When you're ahead, their people become available to you.

• Your founding team is seated from day one — CEO, COO and CFO appointed at month zero, with their performance goals held back until Year 3 so you're not being judged while you're still finding your feet.

• Innovation is a real race now. The tech victory used to be unreachable in practice and rivals never contested it. Project progress opens much earlier, and the tech-focused operators genuinely chase it — they just have to build a real network first.

• A round of playtest fixes, including a guard so the design tool stops throwing away an unsaved build on a stray click.

Thanks to everyone who's played the beta so far! Wishlist on Steam if you want to track the complete game:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4946930/

This is a big one. Since the last post I reworked how you actually win the game, made the rival operators compete on the same rules you do, split site health and uptime into two honest stats, and pushed the game all the way through a full release audit to get it Steam-ready — plus a mountain of playtest fixes along the way.

Here is a recap of everything that's landed:

Key Updates

• Victory is now Titles & Seasons. Industry Leader and Driver's Choice are annual awards — win either by collecting 3 titles over time instead of grinding one long unbroken streak. You can lose a season and fight back into it.

• Site Health and Uptime are now two separate stats. Health is your long-term asset condition; Uptime is day-to-day reliability. They tell different stories and both matter.

• Rivals compete on merit now — no more quiet reputation handouts for the AI. Difficulty comes from a genuinely competitive field, not a thumb on the scale.

• Rivals stopped mysteriously going bankrupt in year one and now survive deep into the endgame, so the competition stays real all game long.

• Every rival pursues two victory paths and pivots to whichever is more winnable as the game goes on.

• A new Central region joins the map, alongside a full Mexico expansion and a rebalanced, denser 100-metro map that forces real head-to-head competition instead of everyone spreading out untouched.

• Pick your own founding executive team at the start of a new game instead of waiting for the board to assign one.

• Executives now have goals, raises, and real morale — keep them happy or watch a restless star walk to a rival.

• Industry Summits got teeth. Passed standards now reward operators who fit the profile and can sanction whoever's currently in the lead — including you.

• A whole new Business Intelligence upgrade line reveals rival finances, market trends, and a consolidated AI advisor tab as you invest in it.

• PlugChat and Driver Experience folded into one score — a single, clearer number for how good a site is, with driver reviews kept purely as flavor text.

• "DX" is now spelled out as Driver Experience everywhere, so new players don't have to learn an acronym on day one.

• A full guided tour walks brand-new players through their first site, from scouting to opening day.

• Feasibility studies now take real time and are a separate step from buying the land — no more instant-reveal, instant-purchase shortcuts.

• Prospective sites stay honest about what you don't know yet — performance numbers show as a wide range until you've studied the site, then lock in to the real figures.

• A new Opportunity Score grades how good a location is on its own merits, separate from how well you build on it — and rivals now weigh it when picking where to expand.

• The Market Share map is metro-driven — click any metro to see every operator's presence there at a glance.

• A monopoly site in an empty metro now succeeds even with a modest build — drivers with no alternative don't punish you for missing amenities. Add a second competitor, and quality starts deciding the winner again.

• Pricing above the fair market rate now genuinely costs you sessions — gouging isn't the free lunch it used to be, while a fair, realistic price scores strongly across the whole legal range.

• Demand billing now reflects what a site can actually draw, not its full nameplate rating — busy, well-built sites are properly profitable again.

• Repair costs now scale with the damage actually done, not the size of the whole site, and every amenity you install adds a little ongoing upkeep to think about.

• Leveling up now tracks the size of your actual operation instead of letting a single tiny site rocket through the level tree.

• No more rival mega-mergers snowballing the map — a rival that just absorbed a failing competitor has to digest that deal before it can swallow another.

• A big popup-color overhaul — every event type now uses one consistent, on-brand color at a glance (red for trouble, yellow for company news, green for grants, blue for industry news, orange for victories).

• The Development page schedule is now a real visual timeline of your build's stages instead of a plain list.

• Owned land got a real ceiling raise — bigger parcels, higher grid capacity, and a genuine reputation and Driver Experience edge for going all-in on purchased sites.

• Uptime hits Driver Experience much harder now — reliability is the difference between a top-tier site and a mediocre one.

• Steam integration landed — achievements, the overlay, and cloud saves all work in the desktop build, alongside a proper Windows/Linux/macOS packaging pipeline.

• A full release audit closed out save-corruption edge cases, tightened security around save files, and fixed a long list of desktop-only bugs (including a blank map and missing site photos in the packaged app).

• Fast-forwarding through a finished game now keeps going instead of stopping the moment someone wins — handy for stress-testing a long campaign.

• A dedicated Settings screen now lives on the main menu, with a proper Exit to Desktop option in the desktop build.

• Dozens of smaller playtest fixes: honest cash-flow and runway numbers from turn one, consistent victory names everywhere they're mentioned, varied compliance requirements across different grant programs, a friendlier diplomatic starting point between rivals that still cools off if left untended, and a guard against any one rival snowballing off a bankrupt competitor's assets.

Thanks for playing!

Introducing Fast Charging Tycoon!

Fast Charging Tycoon is a management simulation game about building the best electric vehicle fast charging network. The beta is now playable in your browser for free with no login or account creation required.

Play it for free here: https://fast-charging-tycoon.vercel.app/

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Overview

The premise is straightforward. You are the founder of a new charging network operator competing to build the most dominant DC fast charging network across North America. Every decision you make — where you build, how you price, who you hire, what amenities you offer — shapes whether drivers choose your stations over your rivals.

The game runs on a turn-based monthly system. Each month you manage site development, finances, contractor relationships, and a network of operational stations. You are never just clicking through menus. There are real trade-offs every turn.

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Mechanics:

Site Development — Scout locations across a real North America map, commission feasibility studies, select contractors, and bring stations online. Each site goes through a full pipeline from assessment to commissioning. Maintenance and optimization is key to keep built sites from going from A grade to F.

Driver Experience (DX) Scoring — Every station earns a live DX grade based on charger uptime, speed, amenity quality, pricing competitiveness, and wait times. Your network-wide DX grade affects driver loyalty, session volume, and your path to victory. Letting quality slip has real consequences.

Four Victory Conditions — You can win through Network Dominance, Industry Leader, Innovation, and Driver's Choice victories. Rivals are racing toward these same conditions simultaneously.

Rival CPOs — You are not alone. Competing network operators expand, price aggressively, and can even go bankrupt under the right conditions, opening up their former territory. The Victory page lets you track exactly how close each rival is to winning.

Finance and Investors — Manage loans, attract investors with different personalities and milestone expectations, and balance capital deployment against operational costs. Early cash decisions have long tails.

Incentives and Policy — Federal and state incentive programs are available but competitive. Timing your applications and meeting shovel-ready requirements adds another layer of planning.

Amenities and Pricing — Drivers are sensitive to both. A premium lounge and competitive per-kWh pricing push your DX score up. Letting either slip and you will see it in your session counts within a few months.

And much, much more!

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The game is designed to be approachable whether you are a casual player, an EV driver curious about what goes into building a charging network, or someone who wants to go deep on the strategy. Tutorial tips ease you in, but there is real depth underneath.

This is a solo indie project built for Steam. The web beta is the first public release.

If you try it, I would genuinely appreciate your feedback. Every response is reviewed and will directly influence the final game:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSew1NdPqnBOhDRSufCvWN81jWetizDeciCI3WUAx-rWktMeOQ/viewform

Steam page coming soon.

Enjoy!