Pictured left: Yooka-Laylee looked to recreate Rare’s early successes with N64 platformer Banjo-Kazooie
really wanted to recreate in Yooka-Laylee: “One of them was the humour and the fact that it was fun to play on different levels – the text and the voices, the noises the characters make, there’s a kind of underlying humour there, a silliness that we wanted to bring back to people,” Sutherland says. Technical art director Mark Stevenson adds: “One of the big pillars for us was characters. Back in the Rare days, our games were very character-based and one of the pillars going forward for [Playtonic] is to create a universe with characters, to see those characters again and again in different games. Each one has the potential to star in a game.” Designer Hamish Lockwood joined Playtonic about a year after its inception, he tells us, and worked on Yooka-Laylee for a year until its launch in April 2017. When talking about the game’s pillars, he mentions the exploration of these large worlds, “collecting a lot of crazy stuff and talking to a lot of weird creatures” as well as the humour Sutherland already mentioned. He continues: “They were definitely things that we tried to push throughout the game. And then as we developed it, we were trying to streamline a lot of the older mechanics. Like in previous games there were a lot of – in fact, possibly too many – collectibles, so we tried to streamline that, and have the energy bar and
then just write out a few different things. But certainly taking Banjo as the blueprint.” Sutherland takes over: “We obviously tried to capture the feel of the original, with the characters, and the characters’ controls... I was trying to have something that felt familiar to people. “Where it didn’t work so well maybe was the camera because we were trying to bring back the style of the camera that we had when those first 3D games were coming out… The cameras tended to take the approach of trying to sort things out for you and trying to position themselves in intelligent places. “So we went along that route because the way the camera frames the player [is part of the] feel of these games. But the way that works means it could actually end up disorientating the player and I think that’s something that we realised maybe slightly later on. “We addressed it in a patch where we introduced different camera options so people could take control, as people now do with cameras in most 3D environments. If we were going back and redoing it all over again we would probably start off with the other camera options in there.” The camera was one of two key criticisms around Yooka-Laylee’s launch with the other being the characters’ voices. Such early criticism could have easily
Pictured above from top: Playtonic’s Hamish Lockwood and Mark Stevenson
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