In a recent interview with USGamer, character art director Steve Mayles and music composer Grant Kirkhope chatted about the upcoming title discussing various different aspects of the upcoming title Yooka-Laylee.
When asked about the character design, and how they came up with the designs Steve Mayles advised:
“There’s some method behind the madness here. I started out with a tiger, but that never got past a 2D sketch. Then I was thinking that these characters in the past have been more underdogs. So I went back to the drawing board, and because we’ve done these sorts of games before, I started to think about abilities. What could they do that would make them interesting to play in terms of all the moves they could do? For example, the chameleon has obviously got his tongue and his tail, and has camouflage. So we can take those things and gamify them, so instead of camouflage just blending in with the background, now it takes on physical properties like metal, or fire, or electricity. It’s the same with the bat – it had to fly because we needed to have those moves in the game. It couldn’t be a bird because of that other game we made, so a bat was a good option. Again, probably under-represented in games, and there are abilities around the bat’s sonar moves we could bring into the game.”
When asked about the difficulty of the game, Kirkhope advised that they are trying to get a different split between hard and easy:
“Kazooie was easier, and Tooie was harder. We’re trying to get a decent split between hard and easy. We’ll have a decent spread of things to do – so maybe people can get through the game without having to do the really tough stuff.”
USgamer pointed out that the graphics and design are reminiscent of earlier N64 titles, and it looks like the team are trying to recreate the great things about retro gaming and bring it into the present with updated gameplay:
“It’s something we’ve been really conscious of musically and graphically, to try and pull some bits out of the early games, but we wanted to make something that feels new. So we were very cognizant of trying to keep the warmth, and making a game that makes you smile because it’s great to see that kind of game. So we’re keeping that in there, and adding new things too. Because hopefully we’re better games makers now than we were 20 years ago. There’s no guarantees obviously, but hopefully we are.”
You can check out the full interview on USGamer’s website here.
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Filed under: Nintendo, Wii U Tagged: wii u, yooka-laylee 
