🎃👻Grez's (really late) 2022 Halloween Event! Back To The Darkness From Whence Ye Came!💀😈

Please note that there is an updated version of the game! Please see notes at the bottom of this main post!

Alrighty, folks! Welcome to the super late 2022 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.

So, the last couple of years, I've done game-flips, which weren't just straight-up asset flips. I mean, I did go get new assets and replace ones in existing games, but I also ended up adding a lot of additional code to make those games better/more focused/the right length/whatever for our events. This year, however, I wrote a whole new game (similar to what I did back with the 1954 game for the PEW PEW PEW train a couple of years ago). I did start with some GameMaker template items to accelerate things a bit, but it's primarily all custom code. I also was using GameMaker 2 for the first time (since I got a 1-year subscription in a bundle somewhere), so there were a few things to learn there as to what's changed from the original one that I already knew at least fairly well.

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 seven 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

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!
• 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.

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 the full Walking Dead Definitive Edition that includes the entire series with remasters of the first couple of games, a $50 package)

FYI, this is honestly pretty easy to do. First "real" playthrough of the finished game, I made it to level 87. Second playthrough, I made level 138. 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.

Important street cred for keys

The game in the last cart in each train, as well as the grand prize, were all donated by jesuswarjesus. So please take the time to say thanks to him, as he got me over the hump to get this from 96 GAs to the 101 that I wanted to make 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? Alrighty. Enough about that.

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.

Things that I would do if I had more time (and especially if I were going to release this game)

First and foremost, there would be some basic graphic options, key reassignment, and saving of settings/high score to at least a local file. I would also design specific waves of baddies with more varied patterns, as well as adding at least 4-5 more of them. I'd add at least a couple of more weapons. And most importantly, I'd have boss battles every 10-20 levels or so. But I was coding an entire game in a week of free time (while I was trying really hard not to let my super-busy life schedule fall off of a cliff), so I had to keep things pretty simple and focused for this go-around. Maybe I'll crack it back open later and enhance it. We'll see.

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 11:59 pm on November 14st - 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 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.

EDIT 11/11

So, I just uploaded an updated version of the game (you can still use the link above). It is totally ok if you've already finished with the original version! I just made some minor convenience updates -- but nothing that will change anyone's ability to get a higher score nor change the difficulty level. If I tweak any of those things, it'll be after the event is done so that everyone was playing the same game at the same difficulty level. :)

Little things I added/changed:

• the game over screen now displays the final level that you reached
• remaining ammo for the powerups now displays at the bottom right corner of the game screen
• fixed a bug on the levels (this did not affect score -- only how levels were calculated) that essentially gave y'all a free 4-5 levels right after level 21...yeah, some of you that barely made level 50 before didn't really hit it. But that's ok. Nobody is gonna make you go back and redo things if you don't want...if you squeaked in there because of my bug, congrats. 😉

View attached image.

View attached image.