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Hiding
Secrets in Platform Games
Anyone interested in the design of so-called
platform games would do well to study the “required reading”:
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Super Mario Brothers 1 though 3 (NES)
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Super Mario World (SNES)
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Donkey Kong Country 1 through 3 (SNES)
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Mario64 (N64)
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Banjo-Kazooie (N64)
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Donkey Kong Country 64 (N64)
Nintendo and Rare deserve quite a round of
applause here. Interesting that Shigeru Miyamoto basically invented
the genre with Super Mario Brothers and re-invented it Mario64.
These two titles were far and away the most innovative of the bunch,
but I’m going to have to give the award of “best design” to
Donkey Kong Country 2. Before I explain why, let’s consider the
progression of these games over time.
In the early days, platform games were about
trying not to die. Dying occurred frequently and the main goal of
the game was to get through all the levels. As time went on, we see
less and less emphasis on the dexterity of passing levels and more
and more emphasis on finding secrets. Perhaps the most extreme
examples are WarioLand 2 and 3 for GameBoy where Wario cannot
die. The entire emphasis on those games is puzzle-solving and
secret-finding.
WarioLand aside, the notion of finding secrets
in platform games led to the “dual goal” platform games of
today. A casual or younger player’s goal might be to simply get to
the end of a game (which may or may not require completing every
level). A more demanding gamer’s goal, though, is to uncover every
secret the game has to offer. In Mario64, this means finding all 120
stars (only about 60 are needed to “win” the game.) In Donkey
Kong Country 2, this means finding all 40 DK coins as well as
finding all 102% of the bonus rooms. These dual goals allow a single
game to appeal to a wide range of players.
If platform games are becoming more and more
about finding secrets, we should define what a “secret” actually
is. To a really old-school player, a secret might be a
near-impossible-to-find item that’s virtually randomly placed.
That’s not the type of secrets I’m talking about. In fact, a
“secret” in the sense of modern platform games is a hidden
something-or-other that is actually meant to be found.
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| This is the first DK
coin in DKC2, placed only slightly above the normal top of
the screen and obviously marked with bananas. The rest won't
be so easy to find! |
Think of these secrets the same way a mystery
author thinks about his plots. A mystery is not a zero-sum game of
writer versus reader. The writer actually wants the reader to figure
out the answer, just not too early. The answer has to be hidden
enough that there’s a sense of accomplishment in finding it, but
there have to be enough clues to make finding the answer possible.
The answer, just like a secret in a platform game, isn’t randomly
created. It’s carefully designed and hidden, and carefully pointed
out by clues.
Donkey Kong Country 2
This SNES game is truly the jewel of the genre
and in my opinion one of the best designed games on any platform to
date. The game is fairly easy to “win” simply by completing all
of its levels. Dying is somewhat frequent, but the difficulty is
pretty low and free lives are plentiful. Even very young players
will be able to get through the difficult parts through repetition.
The real game, though, is to uncover all
the secrets. Each of the 40 levels has one to three bonus rooms and
a single “DK coin.” I believe the DK coin is the greatest
innovation in all of platform games. It’s a ridiculously large,
shiny, spinning coin that somehow manages to be hidden on every
level. There’s something magical about finding that single,
well-hidden secret on every level that just isn’t the same as
finding 5 Jingos (Banjo-Kazooie), 100 coins (Mario64), or any of the
ten zillion tedious things on your shopping list in DK64.
Donkey Kong Country 2 has a well-designed
hierarchy of secrets. Each level has one super secret (the DK coin),
one to three other secrets you “have to” find (the bonus rooms),
and other, less important secret items (banana coins and free guy
balloons). At any time, the player can check how many total DK coins
he has and the percentage of bonus rooms he’s uncovered. He can
also easily check if he’s found the DK coin on any given level,
and if he’s found all the bonus rooms on a given level. All the
while, the character Cranky Kong taunts the player by telling him
how he has no hope of finding all the DK coins and bonus rooms. This
gives the player a clear idea of his mission: to prove Cranky wrong.
Having a clear system to keep track of which
secrets have been found is critical in this type of game. Knowing
that there are 40 DK coins hidden out there somewhere in a huge
world and that you’ve found 23 of them so far, simply isn’t fun.
It’s daunting. Knowing that somewhere in this one particular level
that isn’t even all that big, there’s a tauntingly large,
spinning, golden coin to be found is a fun challenge.
Unwritten Rules of DKC2
Part of the magic of DKC2 is the way all these
secrets are hidden. The highest compliment I can give the game is to
say that I felt every DK coin was placed by a single
intelligence—by one person. As the game progressed, I came to know
how he thought and what he’d be likely to do. In essence, the game
was felt not like an action game of me versus the computer, but a
strategy game of me versus the designer.
In order to create this feeling, the game
established and religiously followed a few unwritten rules. First,
bananas (the common items littered everywhere on every level) are
always helpful. If they spell out a letter or an arrow, it’s
always a genuine clue, never a trick. If a single banana is placed
in some precarious, seemingly impossible to reach spot, it’s
always pointing to a secret. If a banana is over a pit, it always
signifies that jumping in the pit will not kill you. In effect, the
bananas themselves are a character—an entity—trying to help you
at all times.
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| In this underwater
level, bananas forming a letter A are telling the player to
use Enguard's spear swimming move to break the wall marked
by the suspicious single banana. |
Another interesting unwritten rule is that of
running at full speed through dangerous levels. Anytime there’s a
series of obstacles that require timing to navigate (swinging vines
surrounded by deadly bees, spinning cannon-like barrels over pits),
the you can always progress safely by running at full speed and
taking every jump instantly. Just put your fears aside and have
faith that jumping from vine to vine at full speed will somehow work
out, and that you’ll never touch a deadly bee. What’s the point
of this? As I’ll discuss later, most of the gameplay of this game
is the act of looking for secrets. Running through levels at full
speed isn’t going to help you find any so there’s really no
“cheating” involved. It’s just a convenient way to get to a
particular part of a level if that’s where you think the secret
is. Again, the game is trying to help you, and stays true to its
promise, never tricking you and never losing your trust.
Finally, the most ethereal consistency comes in
the methods of hiding secrets. The game uses a number of devices
which the observant player will learn. The oldest trick in the book
is that a big secret is often hidden just barely beyond a small one.
It might look like the screen would scroll up a bit if you jumped to
that cliff…and it does, revealing a not-so-valuable banana coin.
You found the “secret” so time to move on, right? Well the
all-valuable DK coin might be just a little bit higher if you
noticed the smaller cliff above the one you’re standing on.
The game also constantly tests the players
assumption and first instincts. After 10 levels of starting on the
left side of the screen and scrolling right to progress, it trains
the player to assume all levels are this way, then sneaks in a level
where the DK coin is mere inches to the left. Most players
will never even realize going left was an option. And where is it
“legal” to hide a DK coin? I’m sorry to ruin this secret, but
I just can’t resist. 39 of the DK coins are hidden somewhere
inside a level. Exactly 1 DK coin is hidden in a bonus room inside a
level. A secret within a secret. The game has trained the player to
assume that no secrets will be in a bonus room, so what better place
to hide something?
More subtly, the layout of levels often
subconsciously suggests a certain path. Jumping from this ledge to
that vine and so on just looks right. It feels like
the right way to go. And as soon as you believe it’s the right way
to go, the game has got you. And that is the beauty of Donkey Kong
Country 2: it’s a constant psychological battle against your own
assumptions. Every step of the way, the game is trying to fool you.
The bananas are on your side, the but the rest of the level is not.
Like a good mystery, there’s always a clue—there’s always some
indication—of where a secret is. There’s a way to find every
secret without having to constantly kill yourself by jumping into
random pits (the bane of Donkey Kong Country 1).
Suspense and Secrets
In my article on suspense, I talked about how
making something scary happen 5% of the time makes the player very
careful and on-edge the other 95% of the time, even when there’s
nothing to be afraid of. The player doesn’t know there’s nothing
to be afraid of since every little step might be that 5%. Donkey
Kong Country 2 creates that exact same feeling. The game is so
clever and so cunning that every careless step you take just might
be the one that bypasses the secret. This means that even though
it’s a platform game, running to the end of each level is the last
thing the player wants to do. It takes only 1-3 minutes to run
through any level of the game, but since the real challenge is to
find secrets, not pass levels, there’s much more gameplay. A
player might spend 10 minutes on a 1 minute level…or even longer.
I’ll close by leaving you with the thought of
how little of the game’s art and programming assets were devoted
to these secrets. The graphics for the DK coin, the bonus rooms, and
the system of keeping track of which secrets have been found are all
miniscule compared to the design of 40 levels filled with animating
enemies. Look how far some solid design carried this game. By
designing levels around secrets—not sticking secrets into
levels—this 5% of development effort made the difference between a
C- game and an A+ game.
Talk
back! Discuss this article in the forums.
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| "It's
about time I got recognized around here! Forget Shigeru, I'm the
one who made DKC great!" |
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| "The
DK coin was my idea, sonny! Who do you think hid all those
things?" |
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| "Newsflash:
Cranky is never wrong." |
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| "Kid,
you should know that real gameplay has always been in design. I
thought this stuff was supposed to be insightful." |
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