Devlearning: DKC series Secrets

The Donkey Kong Country games are of course classic platformers much-beloved by many, but I'm more interested in talking about the evolution of secrets in these games, rather than about their successes as 'pure platformers'. (Which they are very successful at, mind)

Classic 2D platformers were perpetually wrestling with being something more engaging than trial-and-erroring your way through a developer-designed obstacle course: this goes all the way back to at least the first Super Mario Bros game, where mastering the obstacle course is a decent amount of fun, but a fairly shallow sort of fun. Quite a few games experimented with assorted secret things to find, adding another layer to the experience of travelling through the levels beyond simply 'overcome the obstacle course', but they often struggled to make this work well: the 'Warp Zone' in the original Super Mario Bros, for example, is cool to find, and in terms of player-as-game-agent is obviously desirable since it lets you skip much of the game, making it much easier to beat the game...

... but there's a reason 'play time' is often talked about in regards to game quality. (Even if I have issues with how this framework tends to be used) The player-as-person-having-fun doesn't want the game to end early, they want to keep having fun playing it! So the Warp Zone is kind of an anti-reward for keeping an eye out for secrets: a lot of early platformers experimenting with secrets had similar issues, where finding a secret gives a reward that's actually antithetical to increasing the Fun Factor of the game.

I'm talking about the DKC series for this post in part because it managed to finally find a satisfying solution to this whole thing -after an awkward stumble.

DKC1's experiment with secrets is itself clunky, but... 'harmlessly clunky', I guess?

Secrets per se come in two forms: some cannon barrels are secrets, not specifically marked as different from regular cannon barrels, and then there's the cave entryways you can enter. (Usually you have to break them open first) Being in a secret area has special music play and if you die it will simply eject you back into the main of the level, but it's not necessarily obvious to a new player that, for instance, using one of the level-skipping shortcuts sprinkled throughout the game doesn't count as finding a secret. (Indeed, I spent years thinking they were included) The immediate reward for finding secrets requires a bit of an aside about a different bit of clunkiness with DKC1: it only really had one reward for the player, that being extra lives.

This isn't immediately obvious just casually playing the game without really thinking about it. There's a lot of things to collect given this is an SNES platformer! Bananas, KONG Letters, Golden Animal Tokens, and when you collect 3 Golden Animal Tokens it's time to collect hundreds of little gold stars, all on top of the Extra Life Balloons per se.

But these things are basically all just fractional lives: 100 Bananas converts into an extra life. The four KONG Letters give an extra life. The Golden Animal Tokens throw you into a minigame where you collect golden stars... and for every 100 golden stars you have when time runs out, you cash them in for an extra life.

In turn, this means secrets in DKC1 don't... really offer a substantial reward. They're just more lives in varying fractional forms.

But I call this 'harmlessly clunky', because while there's not much point to pursuing that for the player-as-game-agent, the player-as-person-having-fun isn't being 'rewarded' in an anti-fun way. It's better to give a player an in-game motive for pursuing secrets for a variety of reasons, but this isn't bad.

More problematic to the design is how poorly-communicated secrets are in general. For example, your only indication you've found all the secrets in a level is that the level's name gains an exclamation point (!) on the world map. This is really easy to miss. As a kid, I spent weeks under the impression some levels just had EXCITED!!! names, entirely unaware the exclamation point hadn't been there when I started the level. Even once I did notice a level gaining an exclamation point on completion, I still wasn't sure what it was about. I doubt I was unusual in this regard.

Before.

After. An exclamation point has appeared.

(Also, I never noticed before I made this post: it's 'Jungle Hijinxs'. With an 's' after the 'x'. Oops)

The GBA version, notably, takes a cue from the later games and more clearly signals secrets by having a 'this is your challenge' screen after you've entered a secret area, like so:

It's... pretty silly, honestly, as a lot of DKC's secrets are just little rooms where you can find an extra life or the like. This 'find the exit' screen might lead you to believe that the room is some kind of maze, but the room I used when getting this screenshot is literally a straight hallway with some bananas and a life balloon. No danger, no challenge.

It's at least more of a hint that there's something significant about such a room... though on the other hand, the game also has a screen like this for some shortcut barrels, exacerbating the problem that a player might think the shortcuts are counted as secrets for progress when they're not. The GBA version is a bit of a wash, really.

Regardless, the real 'reward' for collecting every secret in DKC1 is getting the 101% rating on your file, and the percent rating is probably the main thing that clues players into the idea that there's more to the game than just going to King K. Rool and beating him up.

I've always been tickled by the fact that True 100% is 101% in DKC1, incidentally. It's probably the best-designed secret in DKC1, honestly... though it's unfortunate it's tied to the game being deliberately deceptive, where one level in the game has an 'extra' secret and will add DOUBLE!! EXCLAMATION!! POINTS!! if you find all its secrets, meaning if you do figure out the exclamation point thing you're very likely to stop looking for secrets in that level. I suspect very few players actually got 101% truly on their own.


DKC2 is a big stride forward. First of all, it has much clearer signaling that secrets are worth commentary. Most secrets are Bonus Barrels...


...and one of the main exceptions is the even more distinctive cannon...


... and on top of the distinctive visual designs letting you know you've spotted a secret ahead of time, any secret you enter transitions you to a screen that briefly lays out the challenge you're about to be doing, with distinctive music marking out the sequence as different from the main of the level, like so:


Additionally, completing the challenge always gives out Kremcoins, further marking them out as different from simply finding an alternative path in the level. (Which is worth emphasizing, as just like in DKC1 some secrets function as shortcuts, and some shortcuts exist that don't count as secrets!)

So in DKC2 a player pretty quickly learns secrets exist, gets to know roughly what a secret looks like in several senses (Before entry, upon entry, the fact that they come with a quick little challenge to complete...), and has a reason to pursue them, even if it's not clear what the point of accumulating Kremcoins is initially.

This is a big step up in clarity and motivation, without sacrificing the fundamental idea of a secret. Secrets are still hidden -past the earliest ones, which are used to introduce you to the idea of secrets, as well as their basic mechanics, which itself is smart design- but no longer will a player find a secret and have no idea anything of significance has happened at all. That's a huge improvement over DKC1.

Kremcoins as a reward is, crucially, finally a meaningfully distinct reward that the player-as-the-person-having-fun gets serious value out of. Individual Kremcoins are technically worthless, but once you have enough, you can pay Klubba to gain access to one of the hardest levels in the game. Accessing all five of these super-challenging levels requires finding every Kremcoin in the game, and the True Ending is hidden past all these very difficult levels.

Somebody playing the game largely as a 'pure platformer' can beat the main game, unaware they haven't really completed the game, and uncaring besides. Maybe they'll come back later and start digging around for the secrets, maybe not. If they do, though, they'll find the game has more gameplay than they thought it had! Much harder gameplay, at that, and conveniently any player who has bothered to hunt down all the secrets is probably a fairly dedicated player, and thus probably fairly skilled by that point, ready for the challenge, and more importantly having good odds of wanting such an increase in challenge.

This is incredibly good design, and it's no surprise that lots of games made later have a similar basic framework of 'if you do the secret challenge stuff, you're rewarded with new, harder parts of the game'.


DKC2 also adds in Video Game Hero Coins, which are a separate layer of Important Hidden Things. Arguably they're more akin to secrets in the original game than Kremcoin-based secrets are: a thing only worth pursuing for bragging rights. Even so, the game does a much better job of signaling that they're something interesting and worth pursuing, with a distinctive graphic, Cranky Kong explicitly talking about them if you talk to him, and the game informing you of your progress as you collect them.

And of course, when you beat the game, Cranky Kong rates you on your success in this regard, so even if you haven't thought about them before then, it's a good signal for how to get more value out of a game you presumably are having a lot of fun with: go hunt down the Video Game Hero Coins you missed!


You still only get an exclamation point at the end of the name on the world map for getting all the Kremcoins in a given level, which is still easily overlooked if you don't already know about it, so that's a bit sad. On the other hand, you're a bit more likely to notice it since the Video Game Hero Coin's mark for having beaten a level is a lot more obvious, guiding a player to paying attention to level names.

So that's a kind of bonus benefit to Video Game Hero Coins being added.


DKC3 makes its secrets more consistent: all secrets are now Bonus Barrels, and when you enter a Bonus Barrel it always has the marking on the barrel fade away while a distinctive sound plays.

This behavior occurs a few times in DKC2, but only in cases where it's not visually appropriate for the Bonus Barrel to fire you from that particular location. This can lead to cases of a Bonus Barrel being hidden behind a foreground element where it's not obvious until the challenge is being laid out that you just found a secret -this actually matters, because in DKC3 you will always know to commit the area to your memory while you can still see the area the Bonus Barrel is hidden in, where in DKC2 you might think you just found a cannon barrel up until it's too late to try to memorize its location.

So that's a nice step forward.


Kremcoins are replaced with Bonus Coins, but this isn't a meaningful change to the game design. They get used in pretty much the exact same way. The only real difference is that the post-game levels you unlock with them are unlocked in a fixed order, where in DKC2 you could unlock them in whatever order you wanted. The coins themselves are functionally identical, just a new name and graphic: grab 'em all to get access to the Secret True Ending part of the game.


DKC2 also renames Video Game Hero Coins to DK Coins, which is less of a mouthful even if it kind of misses the point, and switches from hiding the Coins to having a standardized enemy (Koin) placed in every level who usually acts as a minor physics puzzle. (You need to hit him from behind with a Steel Barrel, taking advantage of how Steel Barrels bounce off of walls)

Koin is arguably a bit of a step backwards, unfortunately, as Koin is very limiting on level design. Video Game Hero Coins could be placed anywhere, in the air, underwater, whatever. Koin has to be placed on dry land, and has to be placed somewhere where a Steel Barrel can be bounced from behind to hit him. There's a number of levels late in the game where Koin isn't meaningfully hidden and the physics challenge is a joke, because the level design doesn't have a natural place for Koin. If a level is meant to be entirely underwater, the game is obligated to provide a small above-water area at the end of the level for the flag, in which Koin will be somewhere nearby as well, at which point it's really obvious what part of the level Koin has to be in, even if Koin isn't immediately visible in the end of the level area, undermining the whole 'find the hidden Koin' thing.

The game doesn't manage to come up with enough different physics puzzles to make him interesting in every level, either. There's a decent variety, don't get me wrong, but not enough variety for the number of levels in the game. Koin was an interesting experiment, and in some ways I quite like the idea, but it was probably a misstep in practice.


DKC3 also adds Banana Birds and an entire lineup of Quest Junk (Those eight question marks are misleading: in cases where one item gets exchanged for another, the slot gets overwritten), but I generally don't count the Quest Junk because they're not really handled as secrets to find. They're given at certain checkpoints of the game (eg beating a boss) or as a reward for finding something on the world map or as part of interacting with the Brothers Bear. They're also... well, very clunkily handled and annoying all-around.

The Banana Birds are kind of clunkily redundant with Bonus Coins, being just another layer of requirement to getting the True Final Ending, and I'm not a fan of how most of them require completing a Simon Says minigame that's disconnected from how the rest of the game works. I do enjoy how often finding them requires thinking "I wonder..." about something on the world map, like checking if a little beach area can be landed on, but I kind of wish they'd been given by Bonus Barrel-type minigames, not the Simon Says crystal minigame.

The summary of your overall progress is nice, at least. It wasn't necessary for DKC1, but in DKC2 Kremcoins and Video Game Hero Coins are separate tracks of progress, and it was a little annoying being unclear which one you needed to focus on.

The biggest improvement by far over DKC2 that DKC3 makes is in the realm of indicating progress at finding secrets: when you complete a level, you raise a flag, and the flag is either flying all the way or is hanging listlessly. The former indicates you got all the Bonus Barrels, while the latter indicates you missed at least one.


An untouched end-of-level flag...


... and now it's been raised! (It's pink because Dixie was my lead Kong. Kiddy makes the flag blue) But that's a pretty lackluster flutter. How about we collect the other Bonus Coins?


This is more like it. Almost rectangular in its flight.

Now, this is pretty opaque by itself (You don't see the end-of-level flag for very long and might not notice that it's varying across your levels as you play), but the world map reflects the difference as well;


On the left screenshot you can (barely) see the pink flag fluttering down below the golden flag. On the right screenshot it's fluttering behind it. (Also notice how the exclamation point signal was retained: for returning players, you can still pay attention to that. Oddly, they got rid of the Video Game Hero Coin/DK Coin appearing at the end of the name, though. DKC3 is a bit erratic like that)

The golden flag, incidentally, is up in both screenshots because I collected the DK Coin.

So firstly, this can lead to you paying more attention to the end-of-level flag-waving, wondering why sometimes it's one way and other times it's the other way. You can start noticing patterns: if you go back to a level and beat it again, a limp flag may be replaced by a full flag, but the reverse is not true, indicating it's some kind of permanent progress. You can deduce that the full flag/exclamation point is indicative of your status on finding secrets/Bonus Coins in a level, much more plausibly than you could work out the equivalent idea in DKC1 and DKC2.

Secondly, it's just plain convenient: in DKC1 and DKC2, determining which levels that you'd found everything in required a manual sweep, where you walked the Kongs over every single level in search of missing exclamation points. (And/or missing Video Game Hero Coin symbols, in DKC2) This wasn't a huge burden, but it was very irritating, especially since it made it easy to whoops miss one, sweep the entire world map, and have to start over again from the beginning because you have no idea which lack-of-an-exclamation-point/VGHC-symbol you missed. (This was further exacerbated by the need to spend Banana Coins on Funky's Flights for exiting a given area in DKC2) In DKC3, you can just pop into a region and make a quick visual check: any flags missing/flying low? If yes, go to those levels and start searching for Bonus Barrels. If no, leave the area and look at a different one.

Thirdly, being able to see all the flags at once is a lot more noticeable to the player in general. When I originally played DKC3 as a kid, the point at which I started getting clued into my progress or lack thereof was from seeing that in the first and second area I had golden flags and full flags for almost all the levels, and I had a lot fewer of both in later areas. (This is one case where the quests legitimately help with the gameplay: you end up returning to earlier areas to deliver stuff to the Brothers Bear, making it a lot more natural to end up noticing such a pattern in the first place than in the prior two games, where there's no natural reason to return to an earlier area beyond 'I enjoy playing this level so much I want to replay it') Since I was struggling a lot more with finding secrets and Koins in later areas, it was a fairly easy intuitive leap that these were correlated points.

One unfortunate, persistent flaw with the DKC series handling of its secrets is that you never do get a good signal for whether a given secret is one you found before, aside from VGHCs/DK Coins.


You can see that in DKC2 a previously collected Video Game Hero Coin has a checkmark over it -and less obvious in screenshot form but actually a lot more striking in gameplay is that it isn't animated- and in DKC3 a Koin you've gotten the DK Coin from replaces the DK Coin they're using as a shield with a trash can lid. Either way, A: you know not to bother when you've spotted them within the level and B: this makes it easier to connect the world map signal for completion (The VGHC icon at the end of a name in DKC2 and the golden flag on the world map in DKC3) to the fact that the coin has been collected.

The closest that Bonus Barrel-type secrets come to this is that the Kremcoin/Bonus Coin ends up with the same checkmark/lack of spinning as Video Game Hero Coins that you've collected before in DKC2 get... which has the problem that the Kremcoin/Bonus Coin doesn't spawn in until you've completed the challenge successfully. So you won't know going in that you've done that challenge before, and you won't know to not bother until you've already succeeded at the challenge anew!

The Kremcoin hasn't spawned yet because I haven't beaten the baddies...

... oh. I've already done this one and shouldn't have come in here at all. Darn it.

So I really wish DKC3 had realized it should have had Bonus Barrels, themselves, somehow marked as completed if you've gotten the Bonus Coin. (Mind, this would've made one of the most easily-overlooked Video Game Hero Coins even easier to go hours unable to find if it was implemented in DKC2...)

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The evolution of secrets in early platformers has always been interesting to me, but it's especially striking in retrospect. Nowadays, games of many sorts default pretty heavily to including this kind of hidden thing to look for; it's a good way to add another layer to even a fairly straightforward game, encouraging players to think about more than whatever is their current Immediate And Explicit Objective, it adds replayability relatively inexpensively ("You've beaten the game's final boss, but if you want to really complete the game, go replay a lot of the levels you've already beaten, but paying attention for secrets this time!"), it's all-around a really great way to improve a game.

But the earliest examples of secrets were often very much 'to the side' of the main game, or even sufficiently wonky they were arguably making the game worse with their presence. At the time, it wasn't necessarily obvious these experiments would lead to game design improvements of any sort -certainly not as generally-applicable an improvement as secret-searching has proven to be.

It's always interesting to me when seemingly-pointless experimentation of this sort reaps dividends eventually.

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The original version of this post promised I would talk about the evolution of collectibles in the DKC games, and then this never actually happened. I do still find the topic of modest interest, but collectibles were a bit more straightforward in their evolution: DKC1's collectibles were all fractional lives, making the variety kind of pointless in practice, and DKC2 and DKC3 manage to come up with new uses for collectibles so the collectibles are more meaningfully different. So I'll probably never do a separate post for that.