The Kickstarted return of a long-lost style of 3D platforming is a Rare treat in every sense
Most crowdfunding campaigns launch amid an atmosphere of hope rather than expectation. As a spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie in development at a studio staffed almost exclusively by Rare alumni, Yooka-Laylee was as sure a bet as you’ll find on Kickstarter, and so it was little surprise when it quickly passed a modest £175,000 target. No one, however, predicted that it would do so in 40 minutes.
The studio had bargained on its stretch goals lasting for the duration of the campaign, the conclusion of which was set to coincide with the back end of E3 – a choice, creative lead Gavin Price tells us, made to capitalise on any hoped-for announcements that didn’t materialise. Yet the final stretch goal of £1 million, which guaranteed a simultaneous release on all current consoles, was breached in just 24 hours. Playtonic had to scramble to create fresh goals, and when we visit, backers have already funded a fully orchestrated score and Yooka-Laylee is well on its way to the £2 million tally that will make a slice of fullpriced DLC available for free to backers.
There’s still quite a way to go until those backers get their hands on the surrogate Banjo-Threeie they yearn for, though. Roughly three months’ work went into the gameplay footage shown off in the campaign, and while the pre-alpha build we play shows Playtonic hasn’t just been watching that pledge total tick upwards in the interim, the real work won’t begin until the campaign is over.
Nonetheless, it’s apparent Yooka-Laylee is the work of a studio playing to its strengths. Shut your eyes and the marimba-led music and nonsense-babble of the two leads could convince you someone had surreptitiously plugged in an N64. You’re guiding a bat-andchameleon duo, rather than a bear and a bird, but the rest cleaves closely to the design doc of ’98, with large, open levels that make space for a focus on exploration, gentle platforming and breadcrumb trails of collectibles. A jingle sounds as you pick up these shiny blue-andgold coins patterned with the universally recognised symbol for play – a pun on the studio’s name, with a colour scheme that demonstrates a desire to embrace its heritage.
The two leads are immediately appealing, though Yooka has already transformed from tiger to chameleon to fit the versatile moveset Price envisaged. There aren’t many chameleon heroes in games, but character art director Steve Mayles (the man responsible for Banjo and Kazooie) was careful to ensure his new creations stood out in other ways, too. “I always try to come up with unique features,” he tells us, gesturing to Yooka’s three-pronged crest on an early piece of concept art. “Over time, that got hollowed out at the back, so that [Laylee] could fit inside, almost like a little cockpit.”
The pair are adorably animated as well. Yooka leans his bulbous head to the side in response to your analogue stick nudges, while a double-jump move sees Laylee flapping furiously to carry her ally. An amusing idle animation, meanwhile, sees Laylee distract Yooka by dangling a wing over one eye, before hovering around and playfully biting his crest. That alone took Mayles a week to produce. “The bar is a lot higher now than in the N64 days,” he says. “Back then, it was 600 polygons for a character; now it’s 600 for an eye. You’re expected to do much more. It was easy when you could design, model and animate a character in a week and then move onto the next one, whereas now that process might take a month. So it’s a challenge to keep the number of characters high so that there’s plenty of them to [encounter] in the game, but at the same time maintain that quality.”
Indeed, while the aim is to capture the spirit of the N64 era, Playtonic has more ambitious plans for Yooka-Laylee. The main hub environment will be expandable, with the game’s Pagie collectables (twice referred to as Jiggies during our visit) unlocking new areas. And the equivalent of Jinjos will, Price says, “be more involved”. Mayles elaborates: “Initially, we were going to have one ghost in different colours; now we’ve got five different types that you have to do different things [to catch]. There’s a cloaked one you reveal with the bat’s sonar, a scary one that’s always going to attack you, one with a big mouth that you’ll probably have to throw something in, a standard one, and, finally, this wispy one, who’ll be hard to get.” Environments will also be ability-gated, with Yooka and Laylee’s skills expanding far beyond a tongue-grapple and sonar. None of these ideas is hugely novel, but it’s evident the team is keen for the game not to degenerate into a mindless collectathon. There will be items to pick up, in other words, but they’ll be more meaningfully integrated.
What we’ve seen is merely a promising start, but the team has already achieved a surprising amount in a relatively short time. Senior software engineer Jens Restemeier attributes the speed at which Playtonic was able to make that gameplay teaser to the immediacy and flexibility of Unity. “It’s the first engine where you can load up the editor, put some objects in and just play around with them immediately,” he says. “It gives us Xbox support, PlayStation support, and Wii U support. We would not be at this stage if we’d had to make our own engine.”
Even with Unity’s help, Price admits that Playtonic will require extra manpower to meet a planned October 2016 release. With some private funding in place, it has more than the Kickstarter money to play around with, though it’s under no illusions that to achieve the level of quality and polish it’s seeking will require substantial effort. It does no harm, of course, that the core team members already know each other very well, and have years of experience within the genre from which to draw. Not only that, but the prospect of working long hours and enduring late-night finishes is naturally more appealing when the project is entirely your own. “We have that creative autonomy now,” Price says. “Everyone just comes in and does their job and there’s that level of trust [between us]. It’s taken a long time to get the right mix of people, but we’ve got guys who are experts at making this kind of game. And hopefully, if we get a big hit, we can expand the team even more.”