With any crowdfunded project, there is a certain degree of skepticism. Will the developer deliver on its promises? Will the final product impress? Will there even be a final product?
But Yooka-Laylee, the 3D platformer from Playtonic Games, is now just weeks away from its April 11 launch, with the full version nearly complete. The project was backed to the tune of over $3 million during its Kickstarter campaign, meaning the pressure is on to deliver not just a great game in its own right, but also to serve up what many fans wanted from the start: a spiritual successor to Rare's Banjo-Kazooie series.
The game's developer, Playtonic Games, is a new, independent studio, but it contains a few familiar faces. Much of the company's talent is made up of ex-Rare employees, and this is a note that the group leaned on significantly during Yooka-Laylee's Kickstarter campaign, claiming the project would be a "3D platformer Rare-vival."
To find out how the project was coming along, we recently spent some time playing the game and interviewing the band behind the Banjo.
GameSpot: Did you ever worry about how to balance Yooka-Laylee for hardcore Banjo-Kazooie fans and newcomers, and meeting expectations of backers?
Andy Robinson, writer and comms director: Yes and no. One of the key features we wanted to put into the game is the expandable worlds, and that naturally helps appeal to different audiences. One of the big focuses of this game is we wanted to put a lot of player choice into it, and empower players to make their own decisions in how they take a route through the game. Even watching media guys today play the game, you could see that everyone was at a completely different section. Some people decided to go straight to the second world. Some people decided to expand the first world, make it bigger, and just hoover up all the collectibles.
In that way, if you're looking for more of a laid back experience, where you play through in a linear fashion and see lots of different cool environments, you can do that, but if you're a completionist, and you want to hoover up absolutely everything, you can expand the worlds and go through in that fashion.
We've said we're going to make a Banjo-Kazooie-style game and that's where we got all our Kickstarter backing from. But at the same time, we don't want to just be stuck in the past.
Steve Mayles, character art director
There's [also] not been a game like this for a long time. We think that just by that fact that there's a whole new audience out there who have perhaps never played a game like this, never discovered a game like this before--we're quietly optimistic that it will find a new audience just because of that. Even from the fact that there's no HUD, there's no big mini-map telling you where to go. There's no imposing nav arrow, waypoint arrow, telling you, "Here's the challenge." You are free to explore and discover the game at your own pace, which is a rare thing in games today.
Steve Mayles, character art director: It's a fine line to tread really because on the one hand, we've said we're going to make a Banjo-Kazooie-style game and that's where we got all our Kickstarter backing from. But at the same time, we don't want to just be stuck in the past because like you say, that's not going to bring it to new audiences. So we have tried to add in a few elements that weren't seen in their games.
Gavin Price, studio head: We've tried to be as inclusive as possible. We've got the co-op mode in there as well [for] people new to the genre. That was based off a lot of feedback we had from people who had played the old games and wanted to get their kids into this type of game. So we thought, what if we have a kind of hand holding co-op mode that gives families an easy choice to make in terms of, well we could buy this game, we know how to play it. We can slowly show, our kids can be involved as we're playing it and then hopefully they get to take over and become the main driver.
How does the co-op work?
Price: When you have a second controller, you control the B Team, which is a team of bees. They can basically help out Yooka and Laylee. Their storyline is they're a bit angry at [main villain] Capital B giving bees a bad name so they're here to sort that out. They can do things like pause and hold platforms for you, get out of reach Quillies [one of the game's currencies], grab and hold onto and then dispense butterflies for energy as and when the player needs it. It's very much a kind of assistant mode. And the B Team we think will be back in other games as well, and hopefully they'll have expanded roles. Something we talked about once we'd developed the B Team--we thought it'd be great like how you saw in old cartoons, you saw a swarm of bees create shapes and do things, so we think they could come back in future Playtonic games, where you might see the B Team create the shape of a hammer and then you can use it to help.
The B Team and another character, Trowzer Snake, seem perfect examples of the game's humour.
Price: The humour throughout is something that purely reflects the type of people we are when we're making the game--it reflects our personalities. It's kind of a key thing that you don't see so much of in large-scale video games these days--they don't have chance to let a developer's personality come out in humorous ways, they kind of have to play things a bit straighter and by-the-book for fear of overstepping the mark. Hopefully we don't overstep any marks, we just stay the right side of it. But it's brilliant to have that creative freedom--it happens quite naturally during office discussions. Someone will say a joke and we'll find a way of re-contextualising it and getting it in the game somehow.
With our history as well, we kind of had a reputation for trying to get content in under the radar. When we all worked at Rare and Rare were part of Nintendo and [then] Rare were part of Microsoft, we kind of made a rod for our own back. Everything we did was put under the microscope and looked at, and even stuff that was completely innocent, people said, "Hang on, are you trying to say something here?" and it's like "no, no, it literally is what it is." Being completely independent again it's up to us to decide how far to push things and what goes in. But a lot of us have mellowed a bit; we've all become family men now, and I know Steve Mayles got a bit of [abuse] off his wife when she first saw Trowzer Snake, which to the rest of us made it even funnier--that was the funniest thing about the character was the fact that Steve was going home and getting earache off his wife!
What's it like going down the Kickstarter route rather than working with a big publisher like Nintendo or Microsoft like you have done in the past? Do you feel the backers' pressure?
Price: We've got 70,000-plus bosses is what we say inside the studio. And it's good. We're really, really lucky that from day one every fan we've seen commenting on it, there's so much alignment between the type of game and personality they are and we are as developers. Spookily, there's been quite a few instances of stuff mentioned by fans on forums literally moments after we were saying the exact same thing in the office regards a game feature, a character, a potential future project and we start looking around saying, "Hang on, is our office bugged?" We've moved offices four times just to make sure!
We're really lucky with having that community along for the ride with us and they're just eerily aligned to the way we think already. Perhaps it's that we're familiar in a sense through the old games and that's great to have.
It definitely feels like there's a sense of getting the Rare family back together to make this game.
Price: When we're making content as long ago as 20 years ago together, we had a way of working with each other which just worked and brought the best out in us. Since then we've had a lot experience and learned how to improve and bring other elements into our development. It was like having a family. You could say anything to each other and say anything about the game and no one would take offense and it was all, "Yep, I see what you're saying, let's do this." There's such a strong commitment from everyone to continue raising the bar internally. It's exactly like that again now.
The funniest thing about Trowzer Snake was the fact that Steve was going home and getting earache off his wife!
Gavin Price, studio head
It really was, I think the way the industry went it kind of helped us by creating with factors outside of our control. A set of circumstances that meant guys like us could come back together and give it another go at being able to develop how we want to develop on content we want to develop. Things like Kickstarter, the independent game development scene, digital distribution, they've all just come together, but often experiences and genres perhaps being overlooked by companies in pursuit of bigger revenues leave really good gaps for nimble folk like ourselves who can be really creatively led to go into it. Saying, "Hey, we love making that type of game, there's plenty of people asking for it, we don't need 100 million dollars to do this." We don't have a fancy office in San Francisco. [We have] four rooms and a roof over our heads in Stoke-on-Trent.
Mayles: There's no egos, because we've all worked together in various capacities over the years. It's quite a flat hierarchy at Playtonic. So there's no one saying, "I'm in charge of characters. That one's shit, redo it." There's none of that rubbish. So it's just a pleasure to work with these guys, and I think they're all much more talented than me. It's just a pleasure to work with them all.
Andy, you didn't work with the original team; what was it like coming in and joining what was a pre-established team and family?
Robinson: It impressed me how much comes natural to those guys. People like Chris Sutherland, our lead gameplay programmer, these guys do this stuff in their sleep. It's a culture. It really is a culture. It's the whole reason that the company was formed, is because they wanted to return to what they had in the 90s, where it was basically ... There's no imposing structure. There's no line manager. There's no big design doc saying, "You can do this. You can't do that."
It's quite a flat hierarchy at Playtonic. So there's no one saying, 'I'm in charge of characters. That one's shit, redo it.'
Steve Mayles
They all know each other. They've worked for each other a long time. They trust each other. You're trusted to go, "I want a character like this," go make it. Go and animate it. They'll go from concept to creating the model to animating it, it's in the game, which is very rare today. That would probably be five people involved in that. That's probably what impressed me the most. Chris as well, being able to just ... He'd spend months controlling a cube [rather than an animated character] for this game. He'd get the cube fun to run around with. Then that's when [he'd] actually replace it with a character. It's like a science. Watching him is like watching bloody Beethoven.
The group that we've put together during the course of this game ... When we did the Kickstarter, we were seven people. I think we're 22 now. Some of those guys joined after we'd pretty much done the game as well. We made this game with I think an average of 15 people in less than two years, which is also incredible. It's because they know what they're doing. This is their bread and butter. The group that we have put together through the course of this game, personally, is very, very exciting. With people like Justin Cook, who joined us recently, who designed Viva Piñata, and Gary Richards, who designed every single handheld game that Rare did, it's exciting for the future as well.
How do you modernize a game like Banjo-Kazooie for a modern audience? Did you even want to modernize it at all, given many backers are simply wanting a sequel to those games?
Robinson: Obviously, the mandate for this game is that we would make a spiritual successor to the games that a lot of our team worked on in the past. We did have a mandate. The second is that we intentionally spent a lot of time on look and feel. There are a lot of things in the gameplay that we did to try and modernize the genre. Player choice is something that we thought was very important, because all games today give the player a lot of choice on how they experience it. It was important that tonally it felt right, and presentation is obviously front and center to that.
It impressed me how much comes natural to those guys. They do this stuff in their sleep.
Andy Robinson, writer and comms director
That's why we spent a lot of attention to detail in things like the font, which we had made completely custom for the game. It's big, and it's loud. Even the gobbledygook speak--which [composer] Grant Kirkhope and our programmer, Chris Sullivan, made for the Banjo-Kazooie games--recreating that, even that's a long process. You'd be surprised that you have to make sure that the sounds don't go below a certain pitch, or over a certain pitch. It's very, very complex to do that, but we thought it was worth it. We thought that players would appreciate that.
Do you think you can push the genre forward with Yooka-Laylee in the same way you did before?
Price: I think there's room to do that, especially within a sequel. I think the first thing we had to do was deliver on our promise to Kickstarter backers that this is a game that's gonna be familiar to you in cool ways and if you like those, you know you're gonna like this experience. I think then, as a company, if we return to 3D platforming in the future, which I'm sure we will at some point, the challenge is then on us to take it another step further and really push harder and try riskier stuff without breaking what people already love. That's a really exciting challenge. We think we may have an answer lined up for it but there could be one, two, four, five games between now and that point. We're open to existing in any genre. We don't want to be a company just defined by a single genre.
