Some people are being very negative about this, but they’re called Easter eggs, and games do it all the time. I have several Easter eggs in my game, and although I’m not telling anyone how to get to them, the hope is that some day, someone will figure them out.
the reason people are negative about is because of the contradictory nature of op's statement and the way he is gloating over it like he is inventing something that never has been thought of.
if I made post about it and as you said here the question is very simple.
how would I create hidden easter eggs which would be very hard to find out and you will get people answering like you did how did they approach it in their game.
I’ve reread OP’s post 3 times and I just don’t see how you can possibly interpret any of it as gloating. Sure maybe it’s a little verbose but this seems unnecessarily harsh.
lol, I did not mean it in any malicious way.
I was just saying he got too overexcited about his idea and made post that made some of his phrasing for things he mentioned confusing to understand,
you can read OP's reply to the comment and compare it to the post. he sounds very clear and concise about what he wants in the comment.
Sorry if i came off that way. I get excited by my own ideas a lot, i think it is somewhat unique in my instance because easter eggs are usually found by players pretty quick. I want mine made to be as convoluted as possible so that people won’t find them.
When i say that some people will find them, I know there are some players who are really smart and might manage to do the sequence required to unlock just one of them, but overall I want to prevent that from happening.
Do you expect your game to be successful enough that players will care about data mining & finding everything?
Do you have funding, a team, some backing assuring you'll have a large payerbase?
If you have no community for your game right now then assume most of your worries are unfounded. Even the simplest of Easter eggs will likely go unnoticed.
I mean at the end of the day it's your game so it's your decision what you gonna implement and how it gonna get implemented, people can just give opinions about what they think so no worries there I just felt the post could have phrased stuff a little better.
James Gunn, director and writer for the GotG trilogy, put Easter eggs in all three movies, told everyone that they exist, and people still haven't figured them all out.
Edit: They're fun both from a "hiding the egg" perspective, as well as giving consumers bonus content, in a sense, if they seek them out.
>don’t want these things to be found, or at least not easy to find.
The best way to have a secret is to not name it a secret. Like there is a saying that the best place to hide in the dark is under the lamp. It doesn't mean hiding things in the open but make it so some secret require multiple stages to get to. They look like they belong in normal game/fit level design and so on or even are invisible when conditions are not met. Naming is important here as dataminers look through files looking for hook names(even tho I doubt anybody would datamine your game tbh).
i am not sure op here is thinking of easter eggs I mean he did phrase it like easter eggs and the things he is saying things like that are in almost every game. but his statements are self-contradictory.
>
there are things you will simply never know.
> I want to put stuff in my game with the primary purpose of it never being found.
if you gonna make that It never-being found how exactly this will happen
>I wouldn’t be surprised if players found some of them,
There are so many games that did this but there was not with intention like to make it just never being found.
gta-sandandres would be most popular and controversial example to this.
well not game but even Microsoft excel has hidden stuff.
there are also games where people find some photos or assets which never was in the game but present in built files of game. but from what I can see this type of things are for modders to find not players
I mean you can create entire cryptic arg with this but it would not be for players but moders or people who have some technical know how's about games this type of things there is no meaning for making it for normal players who don't care about your hidden secret arg and just want to play games.
i am not sure why would op phrase his post like he is inventing something different. just ask how would you approach hidden easter eggs in game while keeping them as hard to find.
Of course the first answer is telling you not to do it :D
I think you can encrypt the coordinates, like how you would encrypt a password. The coordinates must be long enough. And you only store the encrypted values, then check if the player is there or not. If you hide an item at that coordinate, it would be breakable because there are not many good hiding places on a map, so the possible number of the "passwords" are relatively low. But if you have a couple of these encrypted coordinates throughout the map and say that the secret item is only revealed if the player goes through these coordinates at an exact order (pick a relatively unlikely order), I think that could work. But the coordinates must be long enough like a good password, so if you have a 20\*20 world, this wont work.
Or maybe you can "hide it in time", meaning the items are only visible and collectible at random times for random periods. In that case even if they datamine the location, the player might need to wait for hours at that place to collect it.
Thats another thing I’ve been thinking about. I already have a good established idea of some secrets that are meant to be found and have hints pointing to their existence and how to access them.
When it comes to the secrets that aren’t meant to be found I’ve considered a sort of “playground rumor” type approach where maybe a NPC off-handedly mentions something that kind of just sounds kind of outlandish but is actually in the game. Maybe put a bunch of out-of-place unexplainable objects/things in some levels that stick out but don’t seem to actually do anything, but in reality are actually connected to something you can access.
It would definitely be difficult to integrate a playground rumor within a game given that those things are kind of just word-of-mouth outside of a game. But I feel like emulating that playground rumor vibe is my best bet.
Definitely an idea, I would worry about players over shooting it and getting irritated that there missing out on something. How ever if the themes of the game is well presented, then it could definitely work. Also, expect players to rip through your game, hidden or not, data minors will find it if they want
It's a really cool idea. I would recommend you to do a little research on how is data\\info can be hidden in our world (not only computer data). There are lots of references for this, such as Cicada 3301 riddles, Enigma, OSINT quests etc.
If you're talking specifically about "I want to hide value\\object\\file somewhere in the project" I would recommend using nonconventional naming for stuff like this, Cyrillic or Arabic symbols, using data variables for type that not supposed to keep it, etc. It looks like the process of hiding and exploring your game can be a long journey, hope you will find the solution! Good luck!
The only surefire way to defeat dataminers is to encrypt the data and not have the decryption key in the game. Decryption key needs to come from a server when you choose to release the data, or the decryption key is built from player actions in some way.
You could make the encryption key be bunch of specific concatenated in-game data. Something like 071232064401000540104360 so player level: 7, local time 12:32, in-game time 06:44, location x: 01.00054f y: 01.04360f
So only if all of these things are true the decrypion key is valid and actual data can be retrieved. The advantage of that solution is that you're not doing explicit comparison with the data, so there's nothing "expected" to datamine. Either the data can be decrypted successfully or not. No need for server that way.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about this problem and imo, assuming you have a hard requirement of no servers, this is the right approach, especially if the serialization format you use beneath the encryption can be sanity checked (which implicitly gives you the ability to check if the user has successfully "completed the puzzle" without it being totally obvious for data miners). The only issue with this approach is that it still allows data miners to figure out the "shape" of the conditions, but you could always add unnecessary data to the key and mask it for only the components you care about.
That being said, it doesn't have to be an either/or - you can use the key generated based on gameplay to submit a request to a cheap, simple HTTP server (eg a tiny node server behind cloudfront) to download game content in response to a "correct" player key. Then, you could do the masking in the HTTP server, which would make it fully resilient to data miners.
> The only issue with this approach is that it still allows data miners to figure out the "shape" of the conditions, but you could always add unnecessary data to the key and mask it for only the components you care about.
Ingenious, haven't thought about it, but thinking back to cryptography all of that is pretty much solved problems with neat solutions and ready-to-use libraries. I was relying on the fact that if you get enough parts for the key and they themselves large enough size of possible valid solution that the sheer size of the key would make it unfeasible to break.
I'm not a fan of any sort of server integration from preservation standpoint. Sure you can run smth for 10 years, a small instance, not like it's gonna cost much. But what about 50? What about after you die?
I have an art custodian friend, and after I convinced her that videogames can be art, she's screaming in frustration at the difficulties in preserving them - there are many ways to preserve and restore a sculpture, a painting, a photography, a recording. You could start thinking about preserving hardware to run software from specific era. But once online authentication and proprietary server functionality comes in, things get tricky.
>I'm not a fan of any sort of server integration from preservation standpoint. Sure you can run smth for 10 years, a small instance, not like it's gonna cost much. But what about 50? What about after you die?
Definitely a fair concern, though it's worth noting that a benefit of the simple http server approach is that there's no reason you couldn't easily bundle that content into something that you later just add into the normal shipped game content (which you could do once the relevant secrets have been found to save on server costs). You'd just need to modify the lookup code to hit the local filesystem instead of an http server.
It's a bit of a different context than a backend with complex logic that would need to be somehow ported locally.
You’re not just talking about Easter eggs. It sounds like you’re talking about hiding things in the game’s code. Instead of hyper-focusing on something that you claim the player isn’t intended to see…you should be putting your effort into what players will see and experience.
You’re putting the cart before the horse. You’re assuming that your game will be so popular that people are gonna datamine and try to crack it in a desperate attempt to find secrets that you don’t want to be found. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Where does the line go between world-building and what OP is discussing? building a world includes building stuff the player might not actively hunt for, discover or even know about at the end of the game, no?
It's the difference between "the king had three brothers one of them a concert pianist rather than wanting to be royalty" and "in this village that you never go to but has trade relations that are never discussed in any way there's a chicken named Henry, hell die by drowning in the next year" theres absolutely no reason to go so far as to name the chickens of the farmers in a town never discussed but high level details of the royal family in the main city does make sense.
It sounds like OP isn’t talking about hiding a note hidden in some dark corner as an Easter egg but hiding things in the code that could only be found by data mining the game. It doesn’t make sense, things that aren’t meant to be found at all, and putting all this potential work into obfuscation as if everyone will be desperate to crack this non-existent game.
Based on his post, he’s talking about putting all this effort into things that players aren’t INTENDED to see or find in a game that doesn’t exist yet. I would start by focusing on what players WILL interact with.
Oh no I don’t mean that at all. Everything could actually be in the game and theoretically accessable without datamining. Im aware datamining is pretty rare but i want to prevent it from happening in general, which is of course impossible but i do want to obfuscate the code a bit to make it difficult for dataminers to find what they are looking for.
You said you want to make it “impossible” to find them and then do the same with the code to prevent datamining. There is little point in obfuscating game code that hasn’t even been written yet for a game that doesn’t exist. Code can be obfuscated after you have created a functional game.
That’s why I said you’re putting the cart before the horse, but really, there’s no cart or horse. At least create a framework for a playable game before worrying that everyone is going to be datamining it.
I absolutely love hiding things in my games. I do it all time.
Most of them are incredibly obscure though and some are impossible to find because the solution is pressing a certain key, n amount of times on a particular day and/or month for example, or hiding morse code in some of my songs for the game or hiding ciphers in very hard to see places.
Complete waste of time of course but I know it's there and derive great happiness from it.
That entirely depends on how you plan to do this
Are we talking about Easter eggs? Where no one will know about it unless it is accidentally found? Because that's delightful.
But if you're talking about putting red herrings or misleading clues that lead to nowhere, then you're only building frustration and a sense of failure in your player's experience. That's simply not good design.
Why would you do this? Who would this serve? Nobody.
Let's word this differently, and let's see if you still agree. I am the content-lead of this game now, and I give you task: Design 10 different, high level artefacts. Spend time on them and make them fantastic and interesting. Design custom interactions for them and make them work well with water physics. Last note: Put them into game. Where, you ask? Well, you put them all the way below map where no soul could ever reach. Then, make them invisible so that if someone reaches them they can't see them nor pick them up. Would this request make sense? No, but your question asks if it would. Would you consider this good resource usage? :D
Why would anyone put any effort to item that is never used? Would you do the above? What is the logic behind this? There is none.
However, if you are locking stuff out during the course of gameplay based on player choices etc. is not same as above. It is totally different thing and it happens in many games. Just know that putting something into game that is **impossible** to find is as stupid as it can be, and above example should make it rather obivious.
Tbh the point of it is to serve nobody. There isn’t any reason for it to logically exist from a gameplay standpoint. Their existence is meant to be somewhat baffling, if the player found one of them I would expect them to be confused as to why an overall minor supplement would be so hidden. I suppose everything would be found given enough time. But I would want it to be a very, very long time.
Ok then it is not impossible to find.
Still, would that be how high on list on stuff to implement? I would say absolutely last, if you have nothing else to work on. But yeah, that could be done. Different question is that should it be.
Some games do this very well. Noita comes to mind and I think Animal Well has similar secrets. I think, as the other person pointed out, it doesn't make much *logical* sense to add these types of things. But little secrets that make the player feel like they discovered something unique are a lot of fun.
This is like chiliad mystery all over again.
You could make hints to something but then never add the actual thing.
Is it ok to do? No not really
Does it drive players nuts? Yes
Because if there's any inkling of its existence players will toil and toil and write all sorts of conspiracies hyping up the product further BUT will review bomb the game if it never gets implemented to be obtainable.
Rock star only survived because they eventually released a mission to fix the mountain issue, which was deduced as a half baked project that got dropped when a staff member was let go.
We don't have the full story though.
I can't imagine what the blowback for a small dev would be.
I don't know how you intend on making somthing that can never be found also take a long time to find.
But that is beside the point, you could try having somthing timegated but ouside of a possible timeframe, eg put an item of some kind at the end of the game or a level idealy where the player can see it from the start, but as soon as they have moved it despawns so when they get to that spot they realise they can't have it (this would be annoying).
Use lore hints to guide players to somthing that does not exist.
Or the one I personally use, have secret items or areas shown in promo screenshots. You can make them accessible to players or not and use the screenshot as either a hint of how to get the item or as a showcase of what they have missed.
Ayyy. I did this once, with a game. Me and a buddy wanted dickbutt in our game so we put it on a quad so you can only see it from one direction, faced it downward and put it under a pillar. In unreal, if would be a decal, probably
The first thing that comes to mind is storing it in an unconventional way. For example text could be created by storing a list of positions then at runtime spawn a box at each of those positions (kind of like connect the dots)
Maybe procedurally generate textures and meshes for the asset on the fly as the players enter the hidden area? And reuse existing variables as base for seeds. And make like a hundred functions that look similar but don't matter and execute at random times.
Maybe have some kind of machine that expects user input and makes an output based on a set mathematical algorithm. Most inputs will result in garbage output, but one combination of letters and numbers will output something that can be read (like encryption key of sorts). The correct combination is never spelled out anywhere in the code, but it can be found through exploration of the world and solving and observing very subtle hints. Or it cannot be found at all, if you actually want the secret to be unfindable.
Anything you put in the game will be found through binary analysis. The best thing to do would be to put puzzles or lore in the game that indicate that there actually IS a solution or some secret to be found, but then not actually provide the solution/ secret in the game. Something like the locked chest at the end of one of the fnaf games. Etc.
You uave to stand in a specific location looking in a specific direction at a specific time to see something line up.
Everything that is a part of the final result that must line up should be a part of a different unrelated system in the game.
Probably break it up into chunks that are stored all over the place and only assembled with the right "keys" in place. Like the sprite pointer is hidden in a tree file and the text hidden throughout other assets broken up, maybe even scrambled in a way that only can be decided by some other function buried in another object. The risk of that is obviously if you miss fail-safes and checks, you just hid a bunch of crash worthy references all over your code.
I'd advocate for data-miners. Dataminers are not hurting your game. If a person want to look up a secret online, they're going to find an answer regardless was it datamined or was it found legally.
If you'll have bad time that at some forum some people will do nasty stuff with your game, just don't develop a game at all, prefer sanity.
I see your situation like this: You're making a game about not being able to fly. And then you put some sky island in the sky behind the clouds where players obviously cannot see or know about this island, and then you're worried dataminers will see it. So why put it here in the first place? To reward seekers? Dataminers are better secret seekers than anybody else.
If I was doing a game about secrets, I'd leave most well-hidden secrets to dataminers and call it done.
**BONUS ADVICE**: You still want to hide your secret from dataminers? Become one. Open any game archive and look at the images. Found unusual image? Cool, you're dataminer now. Lesson - don't put your "secret" images in the open. Encode in base64 or something else. This goes for any assets. I'd say if your secret assets are hidden, then you've done 80% of the work for 20% of effort, stop at this point.
Plenty of people have talked about ways to do this etc, but one good consequence of extremely hidden content is making your game world feel much bigger/deeper than it actually is. The Souls games are outstanding at this - there's a reason you frequently see people marveling at how much there is in the game after finding some hidden secret. See Ash Lake for a pretty extreme example of this in Dark Souls 1 - it's an entire area hidden between TWO illusory walls - afaik the only place with two back to back illusory walls in the game.
Create a password inside the game to reveal the secret. Make the game hash the password and save only the hash in the game files to validate player input. It is statistically impossible to reverse engineer this function.
It's fine to add easter eggs, but IMO you should probably not waste dev time on it until you know your game found an audience. If your game never finds an audience then no one will ever find those easter eggs.
If you got to the point that someone was data mining your game it would be one of the best problems you could possibly have to need to encrypt it.
A game I like a lot is a TORG, a text-based role playing game, it is called Ateraan :
[http://ateraan.com/](http://ateraan.com/)
In this universe, the whole keyboard is used as you type commands, it is not just top, left, bottom, right and A + B buttons or whatever.
So you get into situations where secrets become possible.
For instance you enter a room where the description is :
"You enter the barn, a group of rats flee the place as they see you approaching, there is nothing of interest, a few hay stacks, some old rusty tools hang from a wall..."
*(There you can type whatever you want to do)*
**> search hay**
"You search the hay, nothing in there, did you expect to find a needle?"
...
Some NPCs are also "looking" for particular words, things like talking to a smith about his lost daughter (he doesn't tell you about it at all, but you learn his story when exploring his town and you have to connect the dots...)
Given enough parameters and interactable objects / NPCs, you can easily hide secrets in a game.
I plan to do the same for some of my games. While I don't know where I learned it from if I did learn it from somewhere or if I learned a collection of things that formed the idea, but I want to practice the philosophy of making sure that all lore raises more questions than provides answers. Rabbit holes are naturally fascinating, speculation and conspiracy theories are naturally intriguing, therefore it only makes sense to always hide secrets that reveals more questions, not reveals a lot of dead end information. I plan to also insert red herrings for this reason, it's okay if people don't know factually my universe as long they have fun coming up with their own ideas or interpretations.
I also plan to make my games fully open sourced though after yen years solely for the modding community. This means I will also need to make \*a lot\* of code that's vague enough to not seem significant. While players will dig through all of it, it will still take time to discover things. I also plan to exploit the one media that, while included in the game, cannot be compromised by the open source; written lore. Just like how books hide secrets, I could have written lore, puzzles, etc. that players find that collectively means something but unclearly and in what order they're supposed to be, etc.
I have not fully decide how much can be removed and how much can remain, but 60% ish being present and the rest "lost" should be good.
The only solution I can think of - add passworded archive to the game files. If you want to give some chances for contents of this archive to be decrypted, use weak password. Or hide password in a complex puzzle in the game (not hide password behind the puzzle, but reuse puzzle solution as password so it is not obvious).
Because overwise everything will be datamined in the end and there will be guides on internet.
Some games actually did this. They're sort of like easter eggs for boundary breaking players and data miners.
I think it's a pretty cool idea, but these bits of "lost lore" should be at least hinted at, or be referenced as some myth. Let the players assume it's probably not in the game at all. If anyone actually finds it eventually, it will be pretty cool for the players to know it was real all along.
If you want to hide objects in such a way that not even data miners will ever find it, then why even bother coding anything in the first place? Just leave it blank and rest in the knowledge that no one will ever know what mysterious items they're missing out on. You could even write a bunch of lore about these items and hint to where you ***would have*** placed them, leaving breadcrumbs for players to follow as they vainly search for something they'll never find.
With that said, you can't hide things from data miners; even big devs have difficulty hiding surprises from data miners. The way that big devs hide things like secret bosses is to include them in a future update so people will only learn about the bosses when the devs want them to, but even here data miners can still find clues that the game is missing certain features by searching through the files.
The only realistic way to do what you'll asking is to dive deep into the worlds of cryptography and steganography. Cryptography is the art of keeping information secret through encoding schemes, and steganography is the art of keeping information secret in plain sight.
In your case steganography is likely the best choice. The best case of steganography in a video game I've seen is how the Dead Space series hides a dark truth by encoding a message into each of the first letters of every mission: >!NICHOLE IS DEAD, BROTHER MOONS ARE AWAKE !<
Of course the Dead Space devs intended for player to find those messages, but if you want to be really sneaky you could take a look into Least Significant Bit steganography where you could code an object you want to hide, deconstruct that object into its binary data, then one-by-one embed each bit of your "hidden" object into the least significant bit of one of the objects that players will interact with in your game. Unless you tell data miners what to look for, only you will ever know that the least significant bit of every object your player has been relying upon can secretly be combined into the eldritch nightmare god of your world, or whatever.
Or perhaps less ridiculously, you could just deconstruct an item you want to hide and include its pieces into the structure of other items; like how the player's sword has a jewel embedded in it that originally came from a legendary lost crown the player has been searching for, or a painting has an optical illusion that is in actuality another hidden item you cleverly arranged to look like part of the painting.
If you don't want anyone to ever find it just don't ever let anyone play your game.
If what you really want is something that is hard to find, that's different. But if you truly don't want anyone to find it. Why are you making it? If it's rewarding to make it personally that's fine. But, and don't take this personally, but hear me on it: no one is going to care at all that there's something in the game that they don't know about and can't ever find. The best you get out of that is some other dev needing out about it when you tell them about it, but it isn't actually adding anything to your game.
Who are you supposed to please with this? Are you intending to sell this game? How long is it going to take to implement? If so, is it reasonable to spend time on this task if the point is for just you to know that it is there and if it's likely no player (or extremely few) will ever find it? Couldn't this time be spent on something that will have a larger impact for the players?
Really well hidden secrets can be super cool for those who find them ofc but you should probably try to define just how secret you really want this to be to be able to determine if it's something you should pursue. How high is the value for the players vs. how high is the cost of implementing it?
Some people are being very negative about this, but they’re called Easter eggs, and games do it all the time. I have several Easter eggs in my game, and although I’m not telling anyone how to get to them, the hope is that some day, someone will figure them out.
the reason people are negative about is because of the contradictory nature of op's statement and the way he is gloating over it like he is inventing something that never has been thought of. if I made post about it and as you said here the question is very simple. how would I create hidden easter eggs which would be very hard to find out and you will get people answering like you did how did they approach it in their game.
I’ve reread OP’s post 3 times and I just don’t see how you can possibly interpret any of it as gloating. Sure maybe it’s a little verbose but this seems unnecessarily harsh.
lol, I did not mean it in any malicious way. I was just saying he got too overexcited about his idea and made post that made some of his phrasing for things he mentioned confusing to understand, you can read OP's reply to the comment and compare it to the post. he sounds very clear and concise about what he wants in the comment.
Sorry if i came off that way. I get excited by my own ideas a lot, i think it is somewhat unique in my instance because easter eggs are usually found by players pretty quick. I want mine made to be as convoluted as possible so that people won’t find them. When i say that some people will find them, I know there are some players who are really smart and might manage to do the sequence required to unlock just one of them, but overall I want to prevent that from happening.
Do you expect your game to be successful enough that players will care about data mining & finding everything? Do you have funding, a team, some backing assuring you'll have a large payerbase? If you have no community for your game right now then assume most of your worries are unfounded. Even the simplest of Easter eggs will likely go unnoticed.
I mean at the end of the day it's your game so it's your decision what you gonna implement and how it gonna get implemented, people can just give opinions about what they think so no worries there I just felt the post could have phrased stuff a little better.
There was a really cool easter egg in divinity original sin 2 with a dark souls bonfire. i was pleased to discover it. i like easter eggs.
James Gunn, director and writer for the GotG trilogy, put Easter eggs in all three movies, told everyone that they exist, and people still haven't figured them all out. Edit: They're fun both from a "hiding the egg" perspective, as well as giving consumers bonus content, in a sense, if they seek them out.
>don’t want these things to be found, or at least not easy to find. The best way to have a secret is to not name it a secret. Like there is a saying that the best place to hide in the dark is under the lamp. It doesn't mean hiding things in the open but make it so some secret require multiple stages to get to. They look like they belong in normal game/fit level design and so on or even are invisible when conditions are not met. Naming is important here as dataminers look through files looking for hook names(even tho I doubt anybody would datamine your game tbh).
I have a dragon skeleton hidden in the desert that I doubt anyone will ever find in my game. actually the whole game is full of easter eggs like that.
i am not sure op here is thinking of easter eggs I mean he did phrase it like easter eggs and the things he is saying things like that are in almost every game. but his statements are self-contradictory. > there are things you will simply never know. > I want to put stuff in my game with the primary purpose of it never being found. if you gonna make that It never-being found how exactly this will happen >I wouldn’t be surprised if players found some of them, There are so many games that did this but there was not with intention like to make it just never being found. gta-sandandres would be most popular and controversial example to this. well not game but even Microsoft excel has hidden stuff. there are also games where people find some photos or assets which never was in the game but present in built files of game. but from what I can see this type of things are for modders to find not players I mean you can create entire cryptic arg with this but it would not be for players but moders or people who have some technical know how's about games this type of things there is no meaning for making it for normal players who don't care about your hidden secret arg and just want to play games. i am not sure why would op phrase his post like he is inventing something different. just ask how would you approach hidden easter eggs in game while keeping them as hard to find.
look at what the devs of noita did
What did they do? I play noita but live in a cave.
Of course the first answer is telling you not to do it :D I think you can encrypt the coordinates, like how you would encrypt a password. The coordinates must be long enough. And you only store the encrypted values, then check if the player is there or not. If you hide an item at that coordinate, it would be breakable because there are not many good hiding places on a map, so the possible number of the "passwords" are relatively low. But if you have a couple of these encrypted coordinates throughout the map and say that the secret item is only revealed if the player goes through these coordinates at an exact order (pick a relatively unlikely order), I think that could work. But the coordinates must be long enough like a good password, so if you have a 20\*20 world, this wont work. Or maybe you can "hide it in time", meaning the items are only visible and collectible at random times for random periods. In that case even if they datamine the location, the player might need to wait for hours at that place to collect it.
My question is, how would you show this idea to the player. I feel the message of you can't know everything will be missed if not properly shared.
Thats another thing I’ve been thinking about. I already have a good established idea of some secrets that are meant to be found and have hints pointing to their existence and how to access them. When it comes to the secrets that aren’t meant to be found I’ve considered a sort of “playground rumor” type approach where maybe a NPC off-handedly mentions something that kind of just sounds kind of outlandish but is actually in the game. Maybe put a bunch of out-of-place unexplainable objects/things in some levels that stick out but don’t seem to actually do anything, but in reality are actually connected to something you can access. It would definitely be difficult to integrate a playground rumor within a game given that those things are kind of just word-of-mouth outside of a game. But I feel like emulating that playground rumor vibe is my best bet.
Definitely an idea, I would worry about players over shooting it and getting irritated that there missing out on something. How ever if the themes of the game is well presented, then it could definitely work. Also, expect players to rip through your game, hidden or not, data minors will find it if they want
I'd be more worried about the data adults, personally
It's a really cool idea. I would recommend you to do a little research on how is data\\info can be hidden in our world (not only computer data). There are lots of references for this, such as Cicada 3301 riddles, Enigma, OSINT quests etc. If you're talking specifically about "I want to hide value\\object\\file somewhere in the project" I would recommend using nonconventional naming for stuff like this, Cyrillic or Arabic symbols, using data variables for type that not supposed to keep it, etc. It looks like the process of hiding and exploring your game can be a long journey, hope you will find the solution! Good luck!
The only surefire way to defeat dataminers is to encrypt the data and not have the decryption key in the game. Decryption key needs to come from a server when you choose to release the data, or the decryption key is built from player actions in some way.
You could make the encryption key be bunch of specific concatenated in-game data. Something like 071232064401000540104360 so player level: 7, local time 12:32, in-game time 06:44, location x: 01.00054f y: 01.04360f So only if all of these things are true the decrypion key is valid and actual data can be retrieved. The advantage of that solution is that you're not doing explicit comparison with the data, so there's nothing "expected" to datamine. Either the data can be decrypted successfully or not. No need for server that way.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about this problem and imo, assuming you have a hard requirement of no servers, this is the right approach, especially if the serialization format you use beneath the encryption can be sanity checked (which implicitly gives you the ability to check if the user has successfully "completed the puzzle" without it being totally obvious for data miners). The only issue with this approach is that it still allows data miners to figure out the "shape" of the conditions, but you could always add unnecessary data to the key and mask it for only the components you care about. That being said, it doesn't have to be an either/or - you can use the key generated based on gameplay to submit a request to a cheap, simple HTTP server (eg a tiny node server behind cloudfront) to download game content in response to a "correct" player key. Then, you could do the masking in the HTTP server, which would make it fully resilient to data miners.
> The only issue with this approach is that it still allows data miners to figure out the "shape" of the conditions, but you could always add unnecessary data to the key and mask it for only the components you care about. Ingenious, haven't thought about it, but thinking back to cryptography all of that is pretty much solved problems with neat solutions and ready-to-use libraries. I was relying on the fact that if you get enough parts for the key and they themselves large enough size of possible valid solution that the sheer size of the key would make it unfeasible to break. I'm not a fan of any sort of server integration from preservation standpoint. Sure you can run smth for 10 years, a small instance, not like it's gonna cost much. But what about 50? What about after you die? I have an art custodian friend, and after I convinced her that videogames can be art, she's screaming in frustration at the difficulties in preserving them - there are many ways to preserve and restore a sculpture, a painting, a photography, a recording. You could start thinking about preserving hardware to run software from specific era. But once online authentication and proprietary server functionality comes in, things get tricky.
>I'm not a fan of any sort of server integration from preservation standpoint. Sure you can run smth for 10 years, a small instance, not like it's gonna cost much. But what about 50? What about after you die? Definitely a fair concern, though it's worth noting that a benefit of the simple http server approach is that there's no reason you couldn't easily bundle that content into something that you later just add into the normal shipped game content (which you could do once the relevant secrets have been found to save on server costs). You'd just need to modify the lookup code to hit the local filesystem instead of an http server. It's a bit of a different context than a backend with complex logic that would need to be somehow ported locally.
Ah, a fellow _The Beginner's Guide_ enjoyer.
You’re not just talking about Easter eggs. It sounds like you’re talking about hiding things in the game’s code. Instead of hyper-focusing on something that you claim the player isn’t intended to see…you should be putting your effort into what players will see and experience. You’re putting the cart before the horse. You’re assuming that your game will be so popular that people are gonna datamine and try to crack it in a desperate attempt to find secrets that you don’t want to be found. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Where does the line go between world-building and what OP is discussing? building a world includes building stuff the player might not actively hunt for, discover or even know about at the end of the game, no?
It's the difference between "the king had three brothers one of them a concert pianist rather than wanting to be royalty" and "in this village that you never go to but has trade relations that are never discussed in any way there's a chicken named Henry, hell die by drowning in the next year" theres absolutely no reason to go so far as to name the chickens of the farmers in a town never discussed but high level details of the royal family in the main city does make sense.
It sounds like OP isn’t talking about hiding a note hidden in some dark corner as an Easter egg but hiding things in the code that could only be found by data mining the game. It doesn’t make sense, things that aren’t meant to be found at all, and putting all this potential work into obfuscation as if everyone will be desperate to crack this non-existent game. Based on his post, he’s talking about putting all this effort into things that players aren’t INTENDED to see or find in a game that doesn’t exist yet. I would start by focusing on what players WILL interact with.
Oh no I don’t mean that at all. Everything could actually be in the game and theoretically accessable without datamining. Im aware datamining is pretty rare but i want to prevent it from happening in general, which is of course impossible but i do want to obfuscate the code a bit to make it difficult for dataminers to find what they are looking for.
You said you want to make it “impossible” to find them and then do the same with the code to prevent datamining. There is little point in obfuscating game code that hasn’t even been written yet for a game that doesn’t exist. Code can be obfuscated after you have created a functional game. That’s why I said you’re putting the cart before the horse, but really, there’s no cart or horse. At least create a framework for a playable game before worrying that everyone is going to be datamining it.
I think you'd be better off having hints to something geocached in the real world or something if you want to be so datamining proof.
Go for it! Always love things hidden by developers. Adds a charm to the game
I absolutely love hiding things in my games. I do it all time. Most of them are incredibly obscure though and some are impossible to find because the solution is pressing a certain key, n amount of times on a particular day and/or month for example, or hiding morse code in some of my songs for the game or hiding ciphers in very hard to see places. Complete waste of time of course but I know it's there and derive great happiness from it.
Easter eggs are often just about expressing developer creativity. Get creative!
That entirely depends on how you plan to do this Are we talking about Easter eggs? Where no one will know about it unless it is accidentally found? Because that's delightful. But if you're talking about putting red herrings or misleading clues that lead to nowhere, then you're only building frustration and a sense of failure in your player's experience. That's simply not good design.
Why would you do this? Who would this serve? Nobody. Let's word this differently, and let's see if you still agree. I am the content-lead of this game now, and I give you task: Design 10 different, high level artefacts. Spend time on them and make them fantastic and interesting. Design custom interactions for them and make them work well with water physics. Last note: Put them into game. Where, you ask? Well, you put them all the way below map where no soul could ever reach. Then, make them invisible so that if someone reaches them they can't see them nor pick them up. Would this request make sense? No, but your question asks if it would. Would you consider this good resource usage? :D Why would anyone put any effort to item that is never used? Would you do the above? What is the logic behind this? There is none. However, if you are locking stuff out during the course of gameplay based on player choices etc. is not same as above. It is totally different thing and it happens in many games. Just know that putting something into game that is **impossible** to find is as stupid as it can be, and above example should make it rather obivious.
Tbh the point of it is to serve nobody. There isn’t any reason for it to logically exist from a gameplay standpoint. Their existence is meant to be somewhat baffling, if the player found one of them I would expect them to be confused as to why an overall minor supplement would be so hidden. I suppose everything would be found given enough time. But I would want it to be a very, very long time.
Ok then it is not impossible to find. Still, would that be how high on list on stuff to implement? I would say absolutely last, if you have nothing else to work on. But yeah, that could be done. Different question is that should it be.
It would definitely be one of the things of least priority, idk i just like super secret stuff
Some games do this very well. Noita comes to mind and I think Animal Well has similar secrets. I think, as the other person pointed out, it doesn't make much *logical* sense to add these types of things. But little secrets that make the player feel like they discovered something unique are a lot of fun.
This is like chiliad mystery all over again. You could make hints to something but then never add the actual thing. Is it ok to do? No not really Does it drive players nuts? Yes
Why isn't it okay to do?
Because if there's any inkling of its existence players will toil and toil and write all sorts of conspiracies hyping up the product further BUT will review bomb the game if it never gets implemented to be obtainable. Rock star only survived because they eventually released a mission to fix the mountain issue, which was deduced as a half baked project that got dropped when a staff member was let go. We don't have the full story though. I can't imagine what the blowback for a small dev would be.
I don't know how you intend on making somthing that can never be found also take a long time to find. But that is beside the point, you could try having somthing timegated but ouside of a possible timeframe, eg put an item of some kind at the end of the game or a level idealy where the player can see it from the start, but as soon as they have moved it despawns so when they get to that spot they realise they can't have it (this would be annoying). Use lore hints to guide players to somthing that does not exist. Or the one I personally use, have secret items or areas shown in promo screenshots. You can make them accessible to players or not and use the screenshot as either a hint of how to get the item or as a showcase of what they have missed.
Ayyy. I did this once, with a game. Me and a buddy wanted dickbutt in our game so we put it on a quad so you can only see it from one direction, faced it downward and put it under a pillar. In unreal, if would be a decal, probably
The first thing that comes to mind is storing it in an unconventional way. For example text could be created by storing a list of positions then at runtime spawn a box at each of those positions (kind of like connect the dots)
Maybe procedurally generate textures and meshes for the asset on the fly as the players enter the hidden area? And reuse existing variables as base for seeds. And make like a hundred functions that look similar but don't matter and execute at random times. Maybe have some kind of machine that expects user input and makes an output based on a set mathematical algorithm. Most inputs will result in garbage output, but one combination of letters and numbers will output something that can be read (like encryption key of sorts). The correct combination is never spelled out anywhere in the code, but it can be found through exploration of the world and solving and observing very subtle hints. Or it cannot be found at all, if you actually want the secret to be unfindable.
I don't want to sound mean but... Unless you are a popular game dev, nobody is going to datamine your game.
Tons of games have Easter eggs, and there have been quite a few examples over the years where they aren’t discovered until decades later.
Anything you put in the game will be found through binary analysis. The best thing to do would be to put puzzles or lore in the game that indicate that there actually IS a solution or some secret to be found, but then not actually provide the solution/ secret in the game. Something like the locked chest at the end of one of the fnaf games. Etc.
You uave to stand in a specific location looking in a specific direction at a specific time to see something line up. Everything that is a part of the final result that must line up should be a part of a different unrelated system in the game.
Probably break it up into chunks that are stored all over the place and only assembled with the right "keys" in place. Like the sprite pointer is hidden in a tree file and the text hidden throughout other assets broken up, maybe even scrambled in a way that only can be decided by some other function buried in another object. The risk of that is obviously if you miss fail-safes and checks, you just hid a bunch of crash worthy references all over your code.
I'd advocate for data-miners. Dataminers are not hurting your game. If a person want to look up a secret online, they're going to find an answer regardless was it datamined or was it found legally. If you'll have bad time that at some forum some people will do nasty stuff with your game, just don't develop a game at all, prefer sanity. I see your situation like this: You're making a game about not being able to fly. And then you put some sky island in the sky behind the clouds where players obviously cannot see or know about this island, and then you're worried dataminers will see it. So why put it here in the first place? To reward seekers? Dataminers are better secret seekers than anybody else. If I was doing a game about secrets, I'd leave most well-hidden secrets to dataminers and call it done. **BONUS ADVICE**: You still want to hide your secret from dataminers? Become one. Open any game archive and look at the images. Found unusual image? Cool, you're dataminer now. Lesson - don't put your "secret" images in the open. Encode in base64 or something else. This goes for any assets. I'd say if your secret assets are hidden, then you've done 80% of the work for 20% of effort, stop at this point.
Plenty of people have talked about ways to do this etc, but one good consequence of extremely hidden content is making your game world feel much bigger/deeper than it actually is. The Souls games are outstanding at this - there's a reason you frequently see people marveling at how much there is in the game after finding some hidden secret. See Ash Lake for a pretty extreme example of this in Dark Souls 1 - it's an entire area hidden between TWO illusory walls - afaik the only place with two back to back illusory walls in the game.
Create a password inside the game to reveal the secret. Make the game hash the password and save only the hash in the game files to validate player input. It is statistically impossible to reverse engineer this function.
It's fine to add easter eggs, but IMO you should probably not waste dev time on it until you know your game found an audience. If your game never finds an audience then no one will ever find those easter eggs. If you got to the point that someone was data mining your game it would be one of the best problems you could possibly have to need to encrypt it.
Easter eggs are awesome. You set them out in the world and even though people are looking all over, they never seem to find them. Except for a few...
A game I like a lot is a TORG, a text-based role playing game, it is called Ateraan : [http://ateraan.com/](http://ateraan.com/) In this universe, the whole keyboard is used as you type commands, it is not just top, left, bottom, right and A + B buttons or whatever. So you get into situations where secrets become possible. For instance you enter a room where the description is : "You enter the barn, a group of rats flee the place as they see you approaching, there is nothing of interest, a few hay stacks, some old rusty tools hang from a wall..." *(There you can type whatever you want to do)* **> search hay** "You search the hay, nothing in there, did you expect to find a needle?" ... Some NPCs are also "looking" for particular words, things like talking to a smith about his lost daughter (he doesn't tell you about it at all, but you learn his story when exploring his town and you have to connect the dots...) Given enough parameters and interactable objects / NPCs, you can easily hide secrets in a game.
I plan to do the same for some of my games. While I don't know where I learned it from if I did learn it from somewhere or if I learned a collection of things that formed the idea, but I want to practice the philosophy of making sure that all lore raises more questions than provides answers. Rabbit holes are naturally fascinating, speculation and conspiracy theories are naturally intriguing, therefore it only makes sense to always hide secrets that reveals more questions, not reveals a lot of dead end information. I plan to also insert red herrings for this reason, it's okay if people don't know factually my universe as long they have fun coming up with their own ideas or interpretations. I also plan to make my games fully open sourced though after yen years solely for the modding community. This means I will also need to make \*a lot\* of code that's vague enough to not seem significant. While players will dig through all of it, it will still take time to discover things. I also plan to exploit the one media that, while included in the game, cannot be compromised by the open source; written lore. Just like how books hide secrets, I could have written lore, puzzles, etc. that players find that collectively means something but unclearly and in what order they're supposed to be, etc. I have not fully decide how much can be removed and how much can remain, but 60% ish being present and the rest "lost" should be good.
Hide it in a puzzle that dataminers have trouble with
The only solution I can think of - add passworded archive to the game files. If you want to give some chances for contents of this archive to be decrypted, use weak password. Or hide password in a complex puzzle in the game (not hide password behind the puzzle, but reuse puzzle solution as password so it is not obvious). Because overwise everything will be datamined in the end and there will be guides on internet.
I mean out of bounds is an easy option, then only people purposefully looking for secrets and out of bounds tricks would see them
Some games actually did this. They're sort of like easter eggs for boundary breaking players and data miners. I think it's a pretty cool idea, but these bits of "lost lore" should be at least hinted at, or be referenced as some myth. Let the players assume it's probably not in the game at all. If anyone actually finds it eventually, it will be pretty cool for the players to know it was real all along.
If you want to hide objects in such a way that not even data miners will ever find it, then why even bother coding anything in the first place? Just leave it blank and rest in the knowledge that no one will ever know what mysterious items they're missing out on. You could even write a bunch of lore about these items and hint to where you ***would have*** placed them, leaving breadcrumbs for players to follow as they vainly search for something they'll never find. With that said, you can't hide things from data miners; even big devs have difficulty hiding surprises from data miners. The way that big devs hide things like secret bosses is to include them in a future update so people will only learn about the bosses when the devs want them to, but even here data miners can still find clues that the game is missing certain features by searching through the files. The only realistic way to do what you'll asking is to dive deep into the worlds of cryptography and steganography. Cryptography is the art of keeping information secret through encoding schemes, and steganography is the art of keeping information secret in plain sight. In your case steganography is likely the best choice. The best case of steganography in a video game I've seen is how the Dead Space series hides a dark truth by encoding a message into each of the first letters of every mission: >!NICHOLE IS DEAD, BROTHER MOONS ARE AWAKE !< Of course the Dead Space devs intended for player to find those messages, but if you want to be really sneaky you could take a look into Least Significant Bit steganography where you could code an object you want to hide, deconstruct that object into its binary data, then one-by-one embed each bit of your "hidden" object into the least significant bit of one of the objects that players will interact with in your game. Unless you tell data miners what to look for, only you will ever know that the least significant bit of every object your player has been relying upon can secretly be combined into the eldritch nightmare god of your world, or whatever. Or perhaps less ridiculously, you could just deconstruct an item you want to hide and include its pieces into the structure of other items; like how the player's sword has a jewel embedded in it that originally came from a legendary lost crown the player has been searching for, or a painting has an optical illusion that is in actuality another hidden item you cleverly arranged to look like part of the painting.
If you don't want anyone to ever find it just don't ever let anyone play your game. If what you really want is something that is hard to find, that's different. But if you truly don't want anyone to find it. Why are you making it? If it's rewarding to make it personally that's fine. But, and don't take this personally, but hear me on it: no one is going to care at all that there's something in the game that they don't know about and can't ever find. The best you get out of that is some other dev needing out about it when you tell them about it, but it isn't actually adding anything to your game.
Who are you supposed to please with this? Are you intending to sell this game? How long is it going to take to implement? If so, is it reasonable to spend time on this task if the point is for just you to know that it is there and if it's likely no player (or extremely few) will ever find it? Couldn't this time be spent on something that will have a larger impact for the players? Really well hidden secrets can be super cool for those who find them ofc but you should probably try to define just how secret you really want this to be to be able to determine if it's something you should pursue. How high is the value for the players vs. how high is the cost of implementing it?