Gargano Island - 7 000 000 BC

Made by Gly and SlainghisKhan

Welcome to Gargano Island! Play as a prehistoric wild hamster in this fun survival game where size, in fact, does matter. Your task: helping your lineage survive the fierce competition for food on the island.

A game where size actually matters

In Gargano Island, you play as Megs (Megacricetodon a lineage of hamster-like rodents). Your objective is to consume enough resources while avoiding predators. But on this small island, resources are scarce and predators are many. Fortunately, you will have many opportunities to aquire evolutive adaptations: traits that will help you find a way through natural selection.

One central mechanic is size. It dictates the place of your Meg in the food chain - larger animals can eat you if they are not herbivorous, and you can also eat smaller competitors. You can increase your size using the innovation Gigantism. But beware, a larger body consumes more resources, and a gigantic hamster needs a lot of food. If you need to resize your apetite, you can use the innovation Nanism.

A game about fossils

All the animals featured in Gargano Island are in fact inspired by extinct animals from the Gargano peninsula, Italy. During the game, you will compete with the following animals:

• Garganornis ballmani: a giant flightless goose which inspired the epic soundtrack of this game.

• Deinogalerix koenigswaldi: one of the largest fossil from the family of hedgehogs, with very long jaws but no quills.

• Tyto gigantea: a barn owl about the size of an eagle.

• Mikrotia: several species of large mice and the most abundant fossils on Gargano.

Controls

Spacebar = Dash

Recommendation

We noticed the game tends to be slow on Firefox, but faster on Google Chrome.

Acknowledgement

The game was made using Godot 4 during the GMTK Game Jam 2024. All visual assets, including UI and animation, were made by ourselves.

We used several sound resources from opengameart.org (we especially thank artisticdude and AntumDeluge)

https://opengameart.org/content/barn-owl-screech
https://opengameart.org/content/mouse-imitation
https://opengameart.org/content/rpg-sound-pack

The soundtrack is an original arrangement of the Swan Lake by famous composer Piotr Ilitch Tchaïkovski. We sincerely apologize to music lovers.