Today's topic is secrets in videogames. Secrets have been a long tradition ever since the original Mario had a bug whereby you could access the mysterious "Zero World." This wasn't an intentional secret -- as I just mentioned, it was merely a bug -- but it nevertheless captured the imaginations of players everywhere and launched a very long and proud tradition of developers intentionally putting secrets in their games.
Is this a vital aspect to making your game excellent? Well, no. But is it fun to put secrets in your games? Yes, very much so.
If you're behind schedule or otherwise in major crunch time, you probably don't have time to put secrets in your game; you're busy enough just trying to get all the essentials in. But if you're ahead of schedule, and you've got some time to spare, why not put a few secrets in?
Secrets can take all kinds of forms, from those that have a direct effect on the game, like powerful items or power-ups for your character, to secrets that provide extra content, like hidden levels, to secrets that are purely cosmetic, like hidden story scenes. There are a handful of secrets in Sorceror's Stripes, all of the latter kind. They're not really all that secret -- before each level that contains an unlockable hidden scene, the characters will have a conversation hinting at the conditions you have to meet to unlock the secret -- but still, unless you're playing in Pudding (easy) mode, it's not necessarily easy to meet the conditions even if you have a general idea what they are.
Now I'm gonna get back to work on the last story arc of the game, so I'll stop the post here.
- James (Satellite Observatory)
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