On Secrets in Games: Lessons from my third game jam

Of the 11 (!) games I’ve published, Depths of Jupiter stands out to me as the most unfulfilled. 

It was my 3rd game, and it has---despite its name---the least depth of anything I’ve made. 

In the first post in this retrospective series, I set my guiding star “Vibes First.” 

In my second post I realized a more general ideal for myself: I want to have a meaningful relationship with my games.

Today I’m introspecting about why I value secrets in games so highly, and how secrets function as part of a meaningful relationship.

Motivation

Coming after the intense week-long project of Even Shadows Into Gold, I wasn't sure if I should be jumping right into another game jam. But I thought I could do something simple and quick, maybe try to make a game in close to 3 hours for Trijam.

The Trijam theme for that weekend was “Deep Dive.” Oceans came to mind, and I thought there were some vibes in there for practicing Vibes-first game development.

But I wanted the vibiest vibes, which means I needed the deepest dive, which means I needed the biggest planet.

I had a relative visiting early in the weekend, and it was fun telling them about my new game development hobby and discussing game ideas. We ended up watching lectures about Jupiter and learning the latest from NASA, which was a fun way to spend time with family. I didn’t know much about Jupiter before, but now my mind was full of storms, ammonium crystals, and space probes doing science.

My original idea, of a Jupiter native octopus-like diving animal, got replaced with the idea of a probe, perhaps even one that could communicate with Earth.

I had a vague idea for a one-button dive where you could break through ice crystals, escape storms, perhaps other things, and eventually reach a liquid layer. I was inspired by the game Stellar Bloom, which I found in a previous jam. It feels so good to play despite having nothing but a jump button, and it made me wonder what else you could do with just one button.

But before long, it was the last evening I had before the end of the jam. I knew I wouldn’t have time to fulfill all of my ambitions. But surely within a few hours I could do something simple?

Because I’m at least trying to be cautious of not burning out, I’ve been resisting making any game where I don’t have a clear reason to. The game being a neat idea is not enough. Even if it would only take a few hours. Maybe especially if it would only take a few hours.

My considerations for game jam game ideas include:

• What game development things on my to-learn list will I learn making this?
• How vibe are the vibes? Is it an atmosphere I’m uniquely capable of making?
• What would I be learning about myself and my artistic voice by making this?
• What’s actually unique or interesting about it?
• Does this game really need to be made, and made now? Can I leave the idea for later and see if I'm still interested?
• If I don't have time to complete it to my satisfaction before the jam deadline, will I still care about it in a month, enough to come back and fix things that are broken or add things that are missing? 

For Depths of Jupiter, I wanted to learn how to use timers and tweens to fade atmosphere layers in and out. That seemed like a simple approachable thing to learn while making a game in an evening.

But I didn’t need this game to learn that.

I also thought the Jupiter depths vibes could be good vibes, but the deep planet space vibes I was feeling about it weren’t anything iconically unique. Now didn’t need to be the moment for them.

And I thought exploring what you can do with a one-button dive mechanic was interesting, but I can do that anytime in the future. Cool mechanics alone are not a reason I want to be spending an evening working on a game instead of taking a break, when I’ve recently spent so many evenings working on games. A cool mechanic can wait for pretty much any game jam, or just another time without a game jam.

But there was one thing that made it feel like this game did want to be made, and made now, for this particular theme, for this little probe diving through Jupiter. And that was because I had a secret planned.

I’ll tell you the secret, because it’s not spoiling anything. It's not in the game.

Once you’d done your entire dive and landed on the heavier liquid layer of Jupiter, I was going to have it seem like you’re just stuck and the game is over, without telling you you died because it’s obviously an unpolished game jam game. But if you wait the ~hour it takes for a message to get from Jupiter to Earth and back, the game would start showing incoming messages of the person on Earth tracking and responding to your dive.

I knew I wouldn’t have time to do anything fancy during the jam, but I had a little story planned, and ideas to build it out further. There were vibes in there that were interesting and unique and that belonged in this game and nowhere else.

I thought that for this jam, it would make it worth it just to have that one secret in its simplest form. If you crash, wait an hour, and then get even a single message from Earth, that would’ve made making this game worth spending one evening on, to me. 

I thought Minimum Viable Secret would take what, an extra half hour beyond the base gameplay?

Unfortunately, I’d also promised myself I wouldn’t let game jams keep me up past my bedtime, and what was supposed to be a super simple easy game to make ended up having an extra hour of frustration trying to figure out the right syntax for tweening a sprite’s alpha property.

Note to self:

• object.modulate.a = 0
• create_tween().tween_property(object, "modulate:a", 1, time-in-seconds)
• The property is modulate.a, but in a tween it’s “modulate:a”, and it goes from 0 to 1. 

Let me tell you, I searched and experimented and read docs and suffered for so very long. I tried setting colors with color names, with Vec4s, I tried with and without quotes, to the point that I was starting to rage each time I clicked on another forum answer or video tutorial that said to just do it in an animation player. 

I do not want to create an animation player and click around an interface! I do not want to carefully add keyframes and references to the correct animation player node and drag and drop little dots and set the speed and etc etc, for what can be done with a tween in 1 line of code.

Anyway, I did manage to learn how to do stuff with tweens, so that was one goal fulfilled. But after 4.5 hours of game development it was bedtime and I needed to submit what I had.

I promised I would come back to it and add that secret, so that this poor little game’s straightforward gameness would stop making me sad for it. 

But it hasn’t happened yet.

Learning How Much I Value Secrets

I already knew I value secrets enough to spend time on them even when it’s completely inefficient project planning.

Maybe part of what I love about it is how inefficient it is to spend hours on something no one will see while glaring bugs go unfixed. 

I spent at least an hour, maybe two, to put the less-expected area into my first game. Leaving it out was simply not an option. But at least that’s one I expect most players who are paying attention to find.

I spent time on multiple endings for my second game, even though I expected very few people to play even once. And I still want to get back to that because I had more planned.

But since failing my secrets vibes with Depths of Jupiter, I’ve realized that I want to prioritize it even more. 

I’ve spent significant percentages of my development time on stuff no one has seen, or only one person has seen thus far, in every game I’ve made since. 

There are a couple games where I’ve spent more time on the hidden parts of the gameplay than on the obvious ones. For the games where I wasn’t able to get in what I wanted by the jam deadline, I worked more on them afterward.

These are still game jam games, and none of them have had a ton of development time, so it’s not too hard to spend more time on secrets than on the basic gameplay. There’s games out there that have labyrinths of hidden depth, and my secrets are relatively humble. But given that I’m already making little games for an audience of almost no one, making them have a bit more depth that almost no one (or only I) will see is one of the small joys in my life right now.

Question time

Now that I’ve seen my love of secrets continuing to develop in the month since I decided I like them so much, I gave myself a list of questions to introspect about.

Why do I like secrets?

I like being rewarded for deeper engagement.

I like the feeling that there’s more to things beneath the surface.

I like the implication that there’s always more to the things we interact with than the things we are presented with.

I like that there’s parts of my games that belong only to me, and some that belong only to those who care and look deeply, and some that belong only to my friends and family who are in the know. 

I like that the relationship between a person and a game can be deeper or more shallow depending on the secrets the game has chosen to reveal to them. Secrets have the vibe of a deeper relationship.

Do I care if anyone finds them?

I thought I might feel the urge to give hints to my friends, put hints on the game pages, etc. But I really haven’t, except in one case where a friend found part of a secret and was confused and I realized I hadn’t connected the breadcrumbs as well as I’d thought. So I guess the hints are in the game design, but I don’t care beyond that.

I guess I feel like someone else’s relationship with my game is theirs to build. That sounds like a death-of-the-authory thought, but, my best and most honest communication with someone about the secrets in my game is through the game itself, which I suppose is not so death-of-the-authory after all.

Is it okay if no one finds a particular secret?

Yes.

Honestly, no one knows most things about most things I make. Those things just aren’t usually explicitly coded as a game mechanic and identifiable as an objectively discoverable secret.

How do I feel about spoilers and sharing?

I like the version of secrets that connect people, and create deeper relationships.

My vibe: secrets whispered from person to person, with intention and mutuality, sharing the excitement of discovery. Secrets that create togetherness and communication and deep engagement.

Not my vibe: look up an impersonal document made by someone you don’t know or care about that lists “secrets,” because your completionism tells you that once you have checked all the boxes you have finished a thing. This tells the thing you don’t want a relationship with it, you just want to conquer it.

Let secrets connect.

Bonus Lesson on Priorities

Yes, the game itself feels unloved. But you know what's better than having added secrets to that one game? 

Having gone to bed on time.

Somehow, I've kept up the energy to make all the games I've made since. Those games are better, and I like them.

Not losing sleep over game jams is a very good rule.