👻💀 Grez's Halloween Highway - 2020 Halloween GA Event - ends 11:59 Nov 1st 🎃🦶

Update Note:

For those who wanted to enter the GA for Adam Wolfe - Complete Season, this GA has been fixed (it was originally listed as the season pass, meaning that you needed to already own the first episode to enter)! This is a new GA, and I will be deleting the incorrect one soon. So, if you're one of the three people that was able to enter the old one, please note that you'll need to re-enter for this new one. For everyone else who wanted to enter but couldn't, now you can!

It's cart 19 of Train #2. If you need the code again, remember that you can just fire up Halloween Highway, start a new game, die in like 3 seconds, and there's your train code on the end game screen. :)

Update #2:

Per request, I've added Pause functionality to the game. You can now press the Pause or "P" button to pause the game and give your eyes a break. ;)

Alrighty, folks! Welcome to the 2020 Halloween Event:

Halloween Highway!!

This will be a video game event (since everyone here should be a gamer!), similar to my Pew Pew Pew action game event back in January! [I know that some of you may have been hoping for another dungeon adventure like I did last year, but I didn't have the time to author anything that big right now...but I promise that I'm working on one for another event to launch later this year or early next year.] This event has 105 giveaways in it! Some games may include Layers of Fear 2, Lorelai, and Desolate, among others! All of the games are horror/scary/Halloween-themed.

I've been a bit strapped for time lately, but I really wanted to do a Halloween event. And then I got an idea. See, I remembered that, back when I bought one of my first bundles on Humble Bundle, it was the first-gen Gamemaker software (which I used to write the 1954 video game for the Pew Pew Pew event)...and it came with a few games that included the source code. Sure enough, I was able to dig that stuff up and I found something that I thought could be repurposed for this event!

I used a game by the shop Butterscotch Shenanigans called "Freeway Mutant." This was a game that they did for a game jam in one day, and it was never sold commercially. It's simple and perfect for an event like this. So, I've taken it and done a proper asset-flip, re-theming the whole thing to become a Halloween-themed game: Halloween Highway!

Things that I did to make this game:

• I transformed the mutant into a pumpkinhead creature
• I replaced all of the enemy and pickup graphics with Halloween-themed ones
• I did pixel-replacement editing on a lot of the buttons, etc., to re-skin them to properly fit the new game
• I fixed some small things that were annoying when playing on PC, because the game was originally written for iOS/Android (like hiding the mouse cursor)
• I tweaked the code to make things a bit less grindy (more on that later)
• I added badass Halloween music (the sound effects by themselves felt really empty...this runner definitely needed music)
• Finished all of this in two nights :)

Fine, fine, so you're good at hacking through other people's code and changing it. I'm super impressed. Just tell me how this thing works.

Ok, geez, take it down a notch. I'll get to the good part.

So, the game is an endless runner with super-lightweight roguelike/lite qualities. In other words, you'll be able to upgrade some things between runs that you'll get to keep, making future run distance potential better.

You're a pumpkinhead guy with a gun, and you need to dodge the shifty-eyed spiky things on the ground as well as various baddies that you see along the highway. You have a gun, and you can shoot the baddies with it (but not the spiky things on the ground). The gun starts out weak, but can be upgraded over time. Some baddies are also much harder to kill than others, so until you upgrade your gun, there are a lot of them that you'll just have to dodge for a while.

Upgrading the gun

As you run along, you'll see different pickups...various types of Halloween candy as well as ghost slime. Whenever you die, the game over screen will show what gun level you currently have as well as how many of each pickup you need in order to craft the next level of gun. It also shows the increased damage that new gun will do. All of the various candy will simply appear along the highway as a drop...but to get the ghost slime, you have to shoot baddies with your gun. When they die, ghost slime will splat out through the air and land somewhere on the highway.

Why does your guy need candy and ghost slime to upgrade guns? Heck, I don't know! He's a pumpkinhead dude...none of this makes sense and frankly I don't want to live in a world where it does. 🤪

Controlling Pumpkinhead

Steering Pumpkinhead is easy. Remember, this game was designed for touch screens originally, and this still works. If you're playing on a touch screen, simply hold your finger on the screen and slide right and left to steer Pumpkinhead. When you're aligned with a baddie, he'll shoot his gun automatically. If you're playing on a regular PC, you'll need to steer with your mouse while holding your left mouse button. Yeah, yeah, that last bit sounds like a pain, but it's not a big deal. Remember that you're essentially dragging your character, and that's how you do that with a mouse. Again, firing happens automatically so long as that mouse button is pressed down. I actually tested this on both my gaming PC and my Surface Pro, and I liked playing with the mouse better (that's how I got my longest run). So, no whining.

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 more difficult tasks to enter, but the games get increasingly better as well. The first train can be (against my better judgement) entered by anyone, level 0 on up. All of the other three trains require you to have given at least something on SG before, and thus require a measly level 1 to enter.

• Train 1 - Achieve a best distance of at least 200 feet
• Train 2 - Upgrade your gun to level 3
• Train 3 - Upgrade your gun to level 10
• Train 4 - Achieve a best distance of at least 800 feet

That last one make take you a little while, but it's totally doable. I've run for almost 2000 feet, so it can't be that hard.

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 and right below your gun statistics.

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.

Unfortunately necessary note about cheating

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? Alrighty. Enough about that.

Other notes on the game

I did make quite a few tweaks to the code to speed up the overall experience. The game starts dropping the more rare pickups (candy corn and candy bars) sooner in my version than the original, so you can speed up the upgrade process. I've also lowered the collection thresholds for each level of the gun, and reduced the pickup cooldown time so that they'll drop more often as well. I estimate that I made things about 30% less grindy. 😎👍🏻 One side effect is that some of the stronger baddies seem to show up a tiny bit sooner, but honestly it makes the game more interesting and faster-paced, and I think that it's more than a fair tradeoff. All graphic editing was done in GameMaker and Powerpoint.

Ok, let's get going!

First things first: Download Halloween Highway

Install the game (on Windows...sorry, no time to attempt multi-OS support here) and fire it up! FYI...if you want to make the game full-screen, just hit alt-Enter to switch between that and windowed mode.

Other stuff

The trains end at 11:59 pm All Hallow's Day (November 1st - Central Time, US), so you have time to finish up the day after Halloween if you spent too much time reveling in tricks and treats the night before. So, get cracking, and best of luck to you and Pumpkinhead!

A couple of these keys (especially in the lower-level trains) are really 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.

Also, please visit Butterscotch Shenanigans! They wrote the original game, and they have some really cool fully-developed games like Levelhead! Check out their site or visit their Youtube Channel.

View attached image.