Im interested in what you guys think of Easter Eggs and Cheats in games. Do you agree that they may increase the playablity of the game? And secondly, have you put any into your games? Do share ;)

>Do you agree that they may increase the playablity of the game?

If you replace "playability" with "replayability" then yes.

I like date triggered easter eggs like playing an x-mas tune on x-mas or something shocking at helloween ;)

Funny you should ask that. I added cheats to my one arcade game "A Snake's Life" - and just today someone wrote me and asked me if the game had any cheats. They were pretty happy after I pointed them to the user manual. (which clearly nobody reads)

The decision to add cheats stemmed from the idea that I felt that anyone buying the game had purchased a right to see the whole game and that there were almost definitely going to be some people who didnt have the ability to make it to the end without cheating. Not sure if it was the right decision or not... but I have received a lot of email from people who appreciated the cheats so perhaps it was the way to go. I suspect people who don't need the cheats don't go looking for them so perhaps in that sense it doesnt ruin the game for good players.

I think cheats and Easter eggs are nice added touches that players appreciate. I think they're especially cool if you can make them such that the player finds them by accident in the course of normal game play. Plus, they're fun to devise and implement them. :)

OTOH, I don't know of many cheats/Easter eggs in shareware games, but maybe that's because most developers don't have enough time as it is.

Easter eggs are usually found in larger applications, because they aren't planned stuff. Usually they are added by some coder who has too little to do one day..

Easter eggs kick ass, they are great to code and great to find, especially if totally undocumented. Ive added cheats to my games, but no easter eggs yet, although im going to add some to starlines.

I can't image a programmer completeing a game without including a "level skip" or "infinite health" cheat. These are pretty necessary for testing purposes. But the idea of publishing them in the readme.txt is pretty interesting.

Cheats add to the fun and replayability of the game. Using cheats can be good if you get stuck. When I was into N64 Gameshark codes I always really liked the ones that would let you see a debug menu or that, although those weren't built in cheats. Button press based codes have something about them though (up up down down left right left right A B start, isn't that the classic one that was first used in a classic arcade game or something?). Date based easter eggs or cheats are cool too, because those can definitly be stumbled on by accident.

I will be putting cheats and maybe and easter egg or two in my game when it is done.

I have REAL easter eggs in my game Charlie II (http://www.wieringsoftware.nl/ch2/). On Easter sunday, there is one hidden in every level!

This year, some people kept setting the date back for weeks in order to find them all!

A certain amount of 'secret' content is practically required in the genre of my (just about finished! building demo now!) project, and in many others as well... At what point does it count as an easter egg? Only if it does absolutely nothing to further the game progress and is simply amusing?

A game is supposed to be fun and cheats and easter eggs are fun. For some people cheats can ruin the game, but those people are under no obligation to look for the cheats. Most commerical games have them and they have become expected. You may want to leave out the stuff that exposes the game's internals (eg. allowing clipping to be turned off, sprite lists, etc) since that tends to shatter the rather fragile illusion of your game being a real world and aren't really useful to the player. Easter eggs are always great fun and show that the developers enjoyed coding the game. I really like it when a game actually has a mini-game inside (like Day of the Tentacle and Commander Keen).

I love easter eggs, little secrets, amusing diversions and stuff like that. The more you can pack in the better. Of course the time to slip them in is usually at the end of development, and you might be feeling a little burned out by then... kudos to anyone who takes the time to put some in.

I especially liked hearing about the easter eggs in Charlie II - that's class. Nice game, too.

As for cheats - well, I didn't put any in my last game and in retrospect I think I should have. A lot of people have pleaded for them, and I've had to say, "sorry, there are none!". But then, it seems my last game was too hard by most accounts.

In a small way I think cheats help with the marketability of the game itself. I know of some mainstream developers who include cheats with the express purpose of leaking them a few weeks after release to drum up additional ink for the game on websites. The other nice thing is that cheat archives do not discriminate between indie or mainstream games, or even good and bad games, they just want to collect the most cheats and trainers.

I'm a big fan of cheats too, but I recently found quite a practical use for them. Sometimes I get requests from Neko Puzzle users asking for things like an unlimited-time mode, level skip, or restart level. These are features that I think would spoil the game if everyone had access to them. So I implemented a bunch of different cheats to allow for things like this. Now if a player mails me about a feature, I can often send back a combination of cheats.

To preserve the integrity of the high-score table, at the end of the game, the player gets sent to a special cheater's high score table which tags each score with the cheats that were used during that game. >:-)

Mike, that's a great idea! Maybe I'll try it out next year.

Nick, apart from making the game more fun/ replayable, having cheats and secrets is also good for encouraging game community. They are something that users can share with each other, post messages about, tell their friends about.