Games

Meet Yooka-Laylee, a Rare kind of platformer

The inside story of the UK’s most successful gaming Kickstarter ever.
Written by Damien McFerran
11 min readPublished on
Yooka-Laylee.

Yooka-Laylee.

© Playtonic Games

At the end of 2014 something truly incredible happened in the British games development scene. A group of former Rare staffers founded a brand new studio named Playtonic Games and boldly proclaimed that they wished to recreate the glory days of what is perhaps the country's most famous game maker.
Playtonic's roster reads like a 'Who's Who' of Rare's most esteemed employees, including Gavin Price, Chris Sutherland, Steve Mayles, Jens Restemeier, Steve Hurst and Mark Stevenson – all veterans of the legendary company which began life many years ago as Ultimate: Play the Game. With years of development experience between them, and some of Rare's most critically and commercially successful titles to their credit, this really was the formation of a proper dream team – and the studio's first project is just as bold as you might expect.
"The biggest driving force was to make sure I could create the type of games I love to create and play myself," says managing director and creative lead Gavin Price, who can count titles like Grabbed by the Ghoulies, Viva Piñata and the Kinect Sports series to his name. "Rare will always have a great output but there's only one way to guarantee you control what you make, and that’s through your own company."
Compared to other members of the Playtonic team – such as Sutherland and Mayles, who chalked up 30 and 22 years respectively at Rare – Price was a relative newcomer. However, he was at Twycross long enough to experience the seismic changes which took place following Microsoft's purchase of Rare in 2002. He says that it was around the time of the Kinect Sports titles that he finally made up his mind that he wanted to strike out on his own and regain some creative freedom.
"It was a really interesting time and creatively liberating in a sense as Kinect was a blank slate, but for me it just wasn't where my heart or biggest passion for games lay, so I thought of other ways to channel that passion and the idea for Playtonic evolved from there. Things changed at Rare in line with how the AAA industry changed I think; bigger teams were needed so fewer games could be made in parallel and more people on a single title helped to de-risk projects, too."
Price's enthusiasm for creating the kind of vibrant working environment he had experienced during his early years at Rare was shared by some of his former co-workers, and much of last year was spent assembling the dream team we know today. "When the chance came to have enough of the old gang available to create the core team, it was a case of me rounding up those individuals and selling them the Playtonic dream. It didn't take much selling. They all jumped at the chance and I'm glad they did."
Playtonic's debut title is Yooka-Laylee, a classic Rare platformer in every sense of the word. Playtonic's staff have been very open about its inspiration – they're looking to imitate the appeal of Banjo-Kazooie, the classic 1998 N64 title which earned Rare a whole new legion of loyal fans with its dual-character set-up (both pairs team up to create the name of a musical instrument), amazing visuals and trademark sense of the humour.
"Character is key, and not just the ones with googly eyes," replies Price when asked what elements of 'classic Rare' the team was looking to replicate in Yooka-Laylee. "The whole game had personality. There was a purity to the gameplay too and a focus on sheer fun, pushed along with a great sense of humour. This is kind of our creative DNA – owned by individuals not companies – and embellishes what we want to achieve. We want to marry the best bits of our older works with modern gaming tastes, too."
The concept of using a two-character set-up might not be entirely new, but Price is adamant that Yooka-Laylee will make more of this unique arrangement than Banjo-Kazooie ever did, and the desire to offer a compelling two-hero experience is what led to the creation of the game's protagonists. "We wanted to take more advantage of the character's natural abilities this time around, so after a few attempts from Steve Mayles we settled on a chameleon and a bat," Price recalls.
"Steve's sketches of them caused everyone on the team to go into overdrive, coming up with moves, ideas for challenges and scenarios. We just thought there was lots of fun to be had with these two. There have been lots of duos in games – especially in the platform genre – and they work so well."
In-game action from Yooka-Laylee

In-game action from Yooka-Laylee

© Playtonic Games

Playtonic is certainly trying to stick with what fans of the genre know and love, but within that broad template the team is cooking up all kinds of unique gameplay concepts, including ways in which the two main characters can exploit their natural talents.
"They have the 'platform game' moves fans of the genre demand, regardless of who you're controlling," he explains. "But we're adding fun moves around the use of Yooka's chameleonic traits, such as the tongue and colour changing, mixed with Laylee's bat sonar skills and some unexpected ones we'll surprise folk with in future. Unlike before where moves are set in their ways, having a chameleon that has enabled a certain feature and property then changes how other moves work too, and adds more depth across all the other moves, leading to players discovering more about the moves for themselves – even long after they've initially learned them."
Some of Rare's most iconic titles packed in an astonishing amount of content and play time, which naturally leads us to ask if Yooka-Laylee will continue this proud tradition. "I hate this question," replies Price with a smirk. "It's difficult to answer; would gamers prefer a massive 100 square miles of sporadic high-points or a much smaller area packed to the rafters with high-point after high-point? When it comes to Yooka-Laylee, I'm more aware of making sure we have a great ratio of exploration to content and high-points. Size-wise the game will be a hub world plus a number of story-book worlds, which start around the size of a level in Banjo Kazooie and end up being closer to the size of a level in Banjo-Tooie. This means players can choose how much of a level they want to tackle rather than be forced by the developers to have to learn big complex levels all in one go, which you can do if you like by expanding them – but at least it's now the player's choice."
One thing the team at Playtonic will be wary of is adding in collectable items purely to pad out the experience – something that a few of Rare's titles – Donkey Kong 64 perhaps being the worst offender – did in the past. "It's one of the things we have to strike a balance with," Price explains. "Neither way is wrong when you have an audience that is split on this subject, so we won't be putting in any collecting or gameplay which just splits the same repetitive collecting-load multiple times – like Donkey Kong 64 – but collectibles are a great way of rewarding the inquisitive type of player."
Yooka-Laylee in action

Yooka-Laylee in action

© Playtonic Games

The team's combined skills built up during their time with Rare will help make Yooka-Laylee a truly remarkable experience, Price believes. He feels that Playtonic's creative DNA will show through in the finished product. "We have a focus on pure fun, fine-tuned controls, varied game scenarios and of course our sense of humour," he says with a smile.
"These types of things just wouldn't sit well with key stakeholders at bigger companies, but for us we think more games should focus on nailing these elements and not care about marketing box-ticking." It's a not-so-subtle dig at his former employer, but Price explains that there were solid and understandable reasons for Rare moving away from traditional platformers.
"I don't think they turned their back on the genre consciously," he continues. "It was more of a desire to move ahead and try new things such as Viva Piñata and Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts – concepts that kind of needed a bit of horsepower behind them, and they had the hardware to finally do them. Inevitably every studio probably has lots more ideas than developers to go around, so maybe it was more the case there just wasn't enough resources to continue with platformers and deliver new experiences."
One of the ways that Playtonic has been able to earn the creative freedom to make the game it wants to make is by using crowdfunding site Kickstarter. The starting goal of £175,000 now seems laughably modest, as Yooka-Laylee managed to earn more than £2,000,000 (€2.83 million) during its funding run, making it the most successful UK Kickstarter campaign ever. Despite this amazing level of success, Price admits that prior to the campaign going live, he did harbour some niggling doubts.
"I was always worried that despite all the fan support, saying you'd back something and actually pledging your money are two different things," he says. "But the Kickstarter has proved to be the most humbling of experiences as our fans haven't just backed a game, they've backed a team that could be celebrating their own 30 years anniversary in the future. We could look back to this point past all the great games we hope to make and say 'That's when it started' and it would be down to these fantastic fans we have."
By choosing the crowdfunding route, Playtonic has gained the kind of freedom that many developers – especially those beholden to massive publishers – can only dream of.
"The creative freedom and ownership of your IP and content are the biggest pluses for us, especially thinking about the larger 'Playtonic Universe', or how we create and use more characters in different games and genres in future," Price tells Red Bull. "It also puts you under a bigger microscope but we don't mind that – maybe this would scare some creators but it energises us to have so many people following us which spurs us on to deliver a great game for them. It may sound a bit cheesy but it's true. And it's sent a great message out to the industry about the power shift in what types of games people want and who decides what gets made too."
Yooka-Laylee is being built in Unity and as a result Playtonic is in the position of being able to bring it to a wide range of systems, including Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Wii U, PC, Mac and Linux. "Unity will be a fantastic asset for us to deliver on this promise," Price says. "Our technical director Jens has worked on multiple platforms before so he's experienced enough to have a solid plan, and we've got other resources to add and help us out should we need them."
Playtonic is aiming for a digital release, but Price admits that he'd love to do a boxed copy as well. "I love physical," he says. "I'm a hoarder and have cherished SNES collection of games, and many other platforms too, so I'd love us to do a physical release if we can. It may take a partner to help us do this as the team have an obligation to make the digital game that can ship day one on multiple platforms already. Doing a physical version for day one too means you need more resources, as the discs have to printed earlier and you lose potential much-needed dev time."
With the funding secured the truly hard work begins. Playonic's vision has been fully supported by its fanbase and now Price and his co-workers have to make good on their promise of a "Rare revival". We've been lucky enough to play a very early build of the game and it's abundantly clear that this group of veterans knows exactly what it is doing. However, we can't allow Price to go without asking that most burning of questions: what do their former colleagues at Rare think of this venture?
"Lots have been in touch and they wish us all well, and those wishes are reciprocated," he replies. "I had a few drinks with Gregg Mayles [brother of Playtonic's Steve Mayles and one of Rare's longest-serving designers] after the Kickstarter campaign ended and he joked about selling me some of his old ideas!" A little more Rare magic wouldn't go amiss, but from what we've seen, Playtonic has more than enough to go around already.
Sign up to the Red Bull Games newsletter right here: