Note: I know that this is a lot of text. Please read it. I didn't write it for my health. If you don't pay attention to instructions and can't prove you beat the game, even if you win a GA, it'll get re-rolled. I took the time to write a game and a detailed page of instructions...all you have to do is read them. 😉

Alrighty, folks! Welcome to the super late 2024 Halloween Event:

Back To The Darkness From Whence Ye Came!

This is another video game event (since everyone here should be a gamer!), similar to the previous couple of Halloween events! This event has 101 giveaways in it! There is some trash, but a whole lot of treasure! All of the games are horror/scary/extradimensional-evil-being/Halloween-themed.

I was out of town right before Halloween this year, so once again it has made me late for doing my Halloween event. I decided that since my game I wrote a couple of years ago was themed around that lateness, I would use it again, but add some upgrades (more on that later). So, welcome to version 1.2!

Alright, alright, that's super...tell me about the actual game, dude.

Ok, fine, fine...I'll get to the good part.

Totally made-up, conveniently-timed background story: Halloween is over, but somehow all of the ghosts and monsters haven't returned to their own purgatorial dimension of darkness! Nope, they've decided that it's way better to stay here and just continue to terrorize the creatures of this dimension all year long. You, the never-rotting jack o' lantern hero, have to step up and blast these baddies back where they belong. That's right, strap on your weapons and scream toward the evil creatures of the night, "Back to the darkness from whence ye came!!!!!"

Basics

Gameplay

So, the game is an endless arena shooter and completely uncomplicated. Shoot everything that moves, and get as high of a score/level as possible. You can grab powerups to make this easier (more on that in just a bit), but otherwise you just need to run around, keeping yourself from getting hit by the monsters and kill as many of them as possible. You start with 3 lives and lose one each time you get hit. Also, when you get hit, you'll turn red with a glowing ring around your jack o' lantern, and you'll be invincible for 3 seconds -- move away from other monsters fast!

Levels and Scoring

This is super easy. For the first 20 levels, you'll level up for every 30 points you earn by shooting monsters. After that, it'll take 50 points per level. There are eight different types of baddies, and they score as follows:

• Ghost - 1 point
• Cyclops - 2 points
• Chompy Beige Anger Blob - 3 points
• Saucer Demon - 4 points
• Reaper - 10 points (these guys are pretty tough and take quite a few hits to kill)
• Zombie - 5 points
• Tunnel Worm - 6 points
• Big Blue Demon (mini-boss) - 20 points [New! More on that later]

Enemy spawns are pretty well-paced up through level 50...and then the gloves are off. Expect a pretty continuous onslaught at that point, and it will get slightly worse every 10 levels above that. 😈

Enemy Movement

• Ghost - floats slowly, directly toward you all of the time
• Cyclops - moves toward you horizontally first, then vertically, constantly speeding up and slowing down (watch out for these guys, they're tricky)
• Chompy Beige Anger Blob - crawls toward you constantly, moving vertically twice as fast as they move horizontally
• Saucer Demon - hovers toward you, then suddenly breaks into bizarre spiral movement (no one knows why)
• Reaper - travels left-to-right or right-to-left straight across the screen, accelerating as it goes (be careful of that speed if you're on the far side from where it started)
• Zombie - walks toward you, then randomly stumbles into a wavy, drunken gait (because, hey, it's a zombie 😆)
• Tunnel Worm - doesn't move at all...but will shoot three projectiles your direction if you don't kill it fast enough

Weapons/Powerups

• Candy Corn - this is your default weapon. There is so much leftover candy corn (because it sucks and no one wants to eat it) that our hero was able to collect it all and turn it into ammunition
• Orange Candy - shoots a triple set of spinning orange candy, doing the same damage each as the default weapon; limited ammo
• Eyeball Shooter - a splorch-sounding weapon that fires in a single stream, doing the same damage per hit as the candy corn, but firing at 5 times the speed; limited ammo
• Bat Gun - shoots a fairly slow stream of screeching bats that waggle left and right, but do major damage for each hit; limited ammo
• Purple Bomb - single use here, but awesome...grab it and kill every single monster in the room! It won't instantly kill the mini boss, but it will cause a lot of damage, so it's a great finisher if you've already been attacking it for a while.
• Invincibility - grab one of those red pumpkins on the ground, and you'll turn on your invincibility shield for 8 seconds!
• Extra Life - starting at level 25 (before that, you're on your own, kid), you'll occasionally see an orange pumpkin with a "+1" next to it...grab it and get an extra life. But leave it be if you're already at 3 lives, because you can't have more than that! Save it for when you take a hit.

Controls

This is easy. Point the crosshair mouse cursor where you want to shoot and hold down that left mouse button. To move, you can use either WASD or the arrow keys (to support both lefties and righties). Nope, sorry, you can't redefine the keys. Didn't have time to code that. Oh, and you can pause the game by pressing the Pause key or the "P" key -- space will unpause the game.

That sounds good, but you still haven't told me how I can win games

Oh yeah, that's kind of important. So, there are four trains with increasingly higher requirements to enter, but the games get increasingly better as well. All of the trains require you to have given at least something on SG before, and thus require a measly level 1 to enter, but this should help filter out at least some of the bots and extra-bad leechers.

• Train 1 - Reach at least level 10
• Train 2 - Reach at least level 20
• Train 3 - Reach at least level 30
• Train 4 - Reach at least level 40
• Grand Prize - Reach at least level 50 (this is an overwhelmingly positive game called "Orten Was The Case," and while it's not a really expensive game, it's unbundled and is a totally overlooked indie gem...seriously, art style, gameplay, everything...more people need to know about it, so I sprung for a license to get this game more of the attention it deserves)

FYI, this is honestly pretty easy to do. First "real" playthrough of the finished game, I made it to level 104. Second playthrough, I made level 141. 50 should be a piece of cake.

Once you've achieved any/all of these things, the code to enter that train will be available on the game over screen, clearly labeled along with your score.

In case you're not familiar with it, every giveaway on Steamgifts has a five-character code, and that's what's listed as the start of each train. All you need to do is write down your train codes, and insert them into the URL in your browser as follows:
https://www.steamgifts.com/giveaway/ABCDE/
All you have to do is replace "ABCDE" in the string above with your five-character code from the game, and POOF! MAGIC! You'll be looking at the first cart in that train. There is a sample graphic of what this looks like at the end of this description with obviously fake codes in it.

Unfortunately necessary note about cheating and proof that you actually played

Don't do it. Play the game. It's not that hard, doesn't take that long, and should be at least some degree of fun. Anyone caught cheating, whether giving or receiving codes from the game without playing it, will get added to my blacklist. My blacklist is short...but once you're on it, you're probably never coming off. So, just resist being a douche canoe and play the game that I worked hard to bring you, ok? And yes, I know about some of your groups where you exchange invite-only entry codes. I have eyes in there. Resist the temptation. Alrighty. Enough about that.

Get a screen shot of your qualifying game over screen with your profile in the background

The game doesn't save the high score to a file or anything (another thing that I ran out of time to do), so you'll need to get a screen shot. Please get a screen shot of the game over screen that shows all of the trains for which you're qualified, and have your profile up in Steamgifts in the background (I've provided a sample of what that should look like at the end of the instructions here). Please do not post it in this thread and show other people the train codes! Just keep it handy or go ahead and upload it to Imgur or something. I'll be spot-checking wins and all of the most valuable ones, including the grand prize. So be prepared to prove that you played or be ready for a re-roll.

New Stuff That I Added To This Upgrade!!!

For those of you who care, I made some modifications to this version that I think make it a better freebie game than the last version. Here's the short list:

• the screen scrolls with broader tolerances -- in the last version, I heard from a lot of people that didn't like how far you had to move on the visible screen to get things to start scrolling in the open arena space, as they felt having to get so close to the edge resulted in some cheap deaths from things suddenly coming onto the screen near them. I've modified the code to make the scrolling a lot more player-friendly, and I agree that everything plays a lot better this way. I'm more encouraged to move around now.
• I sped up the player movement -- I felt like the character moved a little too slowly, so this (again) didn't encourage much movement. Also, since I added the next feature in the list, I felt that being able to move faster was imperative to surviving the additional challenge. So, you'll really be able to cruise around now. Keep in mind that I coded appropriate ballistic slowdown when you're shooting, so if you're really trying to run away fast, stop shooting and you'll cruise past everything!
• I added a mini-boss monster! -- In the new version, every 10 levels, a mini boss Big Blue Demon will spawn! [I totally stole this graphic from the Geometric Sniper fan page regarding joke difficulty (i.e., imaginary) levels for the game. I put three of them together to animate my demon character and then designed the death graphic myself (yes, I'll let them know later on for proper attribution, but it's not like I'm selling the game or anything).] It's essentially just a bullet sponge, and he gets tougher with each time you encounter him. At first, he just says something ominous and rushes toward you, but starting at level 50, he'll also start shooting a spray of bullets every few seconds as well. Oh, and once his health gets a bit low, he'll speed up, too. You'd better shoot him to slow him down and then run!
• You can now shoot enemy bullets in midair -- if you're good enough to aim right at them, you can destroy enemy bullets with your own shots (you'll even get a point for doing so). Based upon not only having the tunnel worms shooting at you, but potentially the mini boss at the same time, this seemed like something that needed to be added to give the player a fighting chance against a big horde. I've found that, in my opinion at least, this plays better than trying to add bullet hell dodging to an already frantic fight at the higher levels.

Ok, let's get going!

First things first: Download the game!

Install the game (on Windows...sorry, no time to attempt multi-OS support here) and fire it up! Now, your browser and probably your anti-virus may complain that they don't know this file, that it's unsigned (or whatever other malarkey they come up with), and start panicking and tell you not to install it. It does not contain any trojans. The game does not communicate with any external servers or attempt to contact anything over the internet. It just runs on your machine. It's safe, I promise.

FYI...if you want to make the game full-screen, just hit alt-Enter to switch between that and windowed mode. You can also drag the corner of the window with your mouse to resize it manually.

Other stuff

The trains end at 11:00 pm on November 19th - Central Time, US, so you have time to finish up. And this year you have no excuse that Halloween got in the way since I delivered this so late. 🤣

A couple of these keys (especially in the lower-level trains) are pretty freakin' old. So, please be cool and agree to a delete if they don't work for some reason. Being the swell guy that I am, I'll find some kind of replacement game for you of roughly equal value, so you won't go home empty-handed if you were supposed to win something.

If for some reason you're physically handicapped and can't play schmups (no, "I suck at these kind of games" doesn't count 😆), please reach out to me and we'll talk about another way for you to get to participate in the trains.

Good luck, and get to blasting those evil baddies!

Grez

Original post for posterity:

Yep, for real. I couldn't get to a Halloween event near the big day, because I was out of state for over a week right before the 31st. But I'd already saved up a bunch of keys and picked up a few more, and I'll be gosh-darned if I'm not going to get a chance to give this stuff away! So, I've taken the game I coded a couple of years ago, Back To The Darkness From Whence Ye Came! (which was based upon being set a bit after Halloween, anyway), and I've updated it for this year. This includes one important bit of gameplay feedback I got as well as...well, I'll save the surprise for when we're ready to go here.

I've been coding all day and it's almost ready to go. I'll get the trains created tonight, most likely, then I'll make final code tweaks and we're going to be off to the races early this week!

Quick update: well, it's 3 AM, but I have all of the trains and the grand prize GA created (last train took a while since ESGST decided to crap out on me during that one, so I joined all of those carts manually). Anyway, I'm going to get some sleep. Tomorrow, I'll tweak up the code to generate the new codes for this year's trains, get everything compiled and hosted somewhere, and then I'll update this thread with instructions and links...I'll be giving y'all a little over a week to do this, so there is plenty of time to get good enough to enter all of the trains. Until tomorrow!

View attached image.

View attached image.