EDIT:

Well, it's all over, folks! In the end, hundreds played, and over a hundred won!

Thanks to everyone for all of the kind words and constructive feedback. I'm sorry that I couldn't respond to all of it, but, uh, there were a lot of messages.😉 Anyway, I'm glad that I was able to bring the community something that (most of) you enjoyed.

I'm working through checking winners and sending out keys. I'm hoping to have most of it done tonight, but it's already pretty late here so I very well may wrap this up tomorrow. But I promise we'll have it all done in the next 24 hours.

If there's a problem with a key, let me know. If it's something that I can fix, I will. If we end up with a bad key or something that can't be replaced, please be cool and agree to delete that particular GA. I'll get you some kind of equivalent prize that I'll send you through Steam chat or discord or something.

Thanks again for playing and I hope that everyone had a happy Halloween!

Grez

Alrighty, folks! Welcome to the 2025 Halloween Event:

Halloween Highway!!

This will be a video game event (since everyone here should be a gamer!). This event has 105 giveaways in it! There is a grand prize $70 AAA package (that unfortunately is region-locked, because that's what these publishers do now). All of the games are horror/scary/monster/Halloween-themed.

Similar to how last year I brought back my previous game, Back To The Darkness From Whence Ye Came!, this is a game that I created for my Halloween event in 2020. I figured that it was time to bring it back around. I've made further tweaks to it, but nothing as extensive as BTTDFWYC. I've tried to reduce the amount of grindiness by a little bit more, but you'll still need a bit of concerted effort to enter all four trains. Hey, you have almost two weeks, so that shouldn't be hard at all. Also, you'll need to merely be level 1 to enter the giveaways in the trains.

As mentioned previously (but I want to be sure I'm giving proper accreditation), this game began as someone else's, and the code was open source. This was part of my learning Gamemaker and the GML language. What made it challenging this year is that this was made with the old 1.4 version, which is no longer in support, and getting it to run is kind of tricky. I was able to make more code changes and get things to build properly, but it also required closing about 9 different error boxes every time I rebuilt the installation package to test it. 😆

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
• 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 roguelite 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. Also, I've upgraded my guns to around level 20, so getting to level 10 is actually pretty easy.

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? Oh, and I have eyes in some of the little Discord and Reddit groups some of you belong to that you think are secret where you publish game codes from SG. If you try to share codes there, I'll likely find out. Alrighty. Enough about that.

On that note, you need to prove that you actually played the game

This is pretty easy. Just get a screen shot of the game in windowed mode with your Steamgifts profile in the background. DO NOT SHOW THE TRAIN CODES IN YOUR SCREEN SHOT. Please obscure them. An example screen shot is at the bottom of the main post. The game can easily be switched between full screen and windows mode by pressing ALT-Enter. When it's in windowed mode, you can drag the corner to resize the window to your liking and everything will auto-scale.

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 rarer pickups (candy corn and candy bars) sooner in my version than the original, so you can speed up the upgrade process. I also made the rarer items a bit more prevalent, lowered the collection thresholds for each level of the gun, and reduced the pickup cooldown time so that they'll drop more often. I estimate that I made things about 35% 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 link for the game

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. The game was fully tested and works on Windows 11 (didn't have to do any manual compatibility stuff).

Other stuff

The trains open up early on October 17th and end at 11:59 pm Halloween Night (October 31st - Central Time, US). 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.

Update for linux users

SG member and linux user, Tyreg, has the following advice for those who want to play this Windows game on linux (using Proton & wine):

Here's what worked for me:

1. Extract the installer: 7z e Halloween_Highway_Installer.exe
2. Run with wine: wine Halloween_Highway.exe or add Halloween_Highway.exe as a non-steam game and enable Proton compatibility

View attached image.

View attached image.