Gigalomania

About the game

Gigalomania is a real-time strategy game with a god's-eye view. You lead a small tribe on an island divided into sectors, and your rivals, the computer players of other colours, are doing the same on the neighbouring sectors. You hold a sector by having a tower in it, and what the ground of each sector offers decides what you can make there: some have wood, some stone, some metal, and the best weapons need materials that only certain places have.

The core of the game is a loop of three jobs. First you put men to work designing a weapon, and when the design is done you can make it. Then you turn more men into armed soldiers, and you assemble them into an army. Finally you send that army to a neighbouring sector, where it attacks the buildings and the people on it, until the tower falls. You win an island when every enemy tower and every enemy soldier is gone.

What gives the game its flavour is the climb through ten ages. You start in the Stone Age with rocks and sticks, and you move forward through spears, bows, cannons, rifles, biplanes and jets, to nuclear missiles and spaceships in the last age. Each island can be played in a different age, so a new age brings a new set of things to invent and new materials to find. Your men are a limited resource: each man put to work on a design or on a weapon is a man not defending your tower.

Mark Harman released the first version of the game in 2004 as free software, and it has been ported to many systems since. It has a built-in tutorial that leads you through the first steps.

Playing it here

This is Gigalomania 1.0.1, the latest release, compiled for the browser from the project's source code. The download is about 26 MB, mostly pictures and music, and the game plays offline once it has loaded. The game in progress is saved in this browser when you leave it and comes back the next time you open the page; clearing this site's data deletes it. The game is in English.

To learn the game, choose Tutorial on the first screen, pick a player and follow the lessons in order. To go straight into a game, choose Single island (every island is a separate game with as many men as you like) or All islands (a campaign with a limited stock of men).

Controls

The icons show a small help text when the mouse rests on them, with what each button does. If your mouse has a single button, or you are on a touchpad, open Options on the island selection screen and switch to the one-button interface.

Tips

Start with a rock. In the first age, open the light bulb, pick the rock weapon and add a few men to design it with the right mouse button. When the design is done, go to the shield icon, hold the left button to arm men with it, and send the army to the sector next door. The computer players do not defend early on.

Choose how many men to play with. On the island screen, the right mouse button on the number adds men and the left button removes them. In the first ages, 15 to 20 men is a good start, and the later ages ask for more.

Look at the sector before you build. The materials in the ground decide which weapons you can make there, and a rival will not wait while you plan.

Use the speed button. The arrow icon above the shields changes the game speed, which helps while you wait for a design.

FAQ

Is it multiplayer? No. You play against computer players only, in a single-player game.

Why does nothing happen when I right-click? Click once on the game first so that the page has the focus. The game needs both mouse buttons, so open the Options screen and turn on the one-button interface if you do not have a second one.

How do I save? The game saves itself when you leave the page. In the All islands game, the Options screen also has buttons to save and load.

Credits

Gigalomania is by Mark Harman, free software under the GNU GPL version 2 or later. Several other people contributed to it: Macrofeet (the biplanes, jets and player faces), Rob Hunter (the voice samples), Sindre Froyn (music), Stephen Fish and others. The graphics, sounds and music from other authors are used under free licenses, and the ones that need credit are listed here.

Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 3.0): the music "Warm Ink" by _ghost; the music by Sindre Froyn; the bomb sound by Mike Koenig; the pain sound by Michel Baradari; the biplane sound by jobromedia; the biplane model by Macrofeet, with parts by Fabien and nicolasbravo1235; the player faces by Macrofeet, with parts by JeannotLandry; and icons and textures by JosipKladaric, Yar, Chromaeleon, sunburn, Lamoot, Scribe, Nick, bart, Keith333 and Dim.

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA 3.0): the people sprites by wulax; the turret by mcco0055; the boulders, bones, grass and plants by Clint Bellanger (from the FLARE game); the mammoth icon by WolfmanSF; the egg icon by Dendrofil; the crystal icon by Hansjörg Malthaner; the biplane icon by Dr. Wessmann; the weapon icons by elerya; the gravestone by Lamoot and Clint Bellanger; the brick texture by Bart K; and the space picture by ac3raven.

Much of the rest is public domain (CC0) from OpenGameArt.org and Wikimedia Commons authors, or under the GPL or LGPL. The full list, with each file and license, and the license texts, are in the license file hosted with the game.