Playtonic on the Yooka-Laylee character names
Playtonic’s new 3D platformer is called “Yooka-Laylee”. As it turns out, those are also the names of the game’s lead characters. Yooka is the chameleon while Laylee is the bat.
So how’d Playtonic come up with those names anyway? In a new website interview, artist Greg Mayles explained:
It was planned like this from the start. Yes, that’s right. It wasn’t just a happy coincidence that ‘Ukulele’ splits so well into two character names, honest.
Actually, someone on the team picked up a Hawaiian dictionary and apparently ‘’uku’ means ‘a small brained person’ and ‘lele’ means ‘to fly’ or, excitingly, ‘to get off of a vehicle’. That’s definitely not a coincidence either.
Yooka-Laylee came to Kickstarter last week, and quickly surpassed its $270,000 funding goal. Over $2.1 million has been raised thus far.