Playtonic

Posted on 9 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in News, Wii U eShop | 3 Comments

Yooka-Laylee’s Kickstarter campaign has been updated with yet another stretch goal. At £2 million, the studio will prepare DLC that will be free to backers. This content will only be created once the game itself has been completed.

Playtonic wrote in a Kickstarter update:

Smashing it up like a student in Yates’s, Yooka-Laylee backers have strawpedo’d their way through the latest stretch goal, and so now an orchestral soundtrack will be enjoyed by all. But before you stumble towards the high street intending to disseminate a large donner meat and chips – wait, because there’s more…

The entire Playtonic team would like to offer its sincere thanks to everyone who has backed the Yooka-Laylee campaign so far. Our intention from the beginning was to use Kickstarter as a means to improve our game, and by helping us reach an incredible £1.5 million you’ve shaped it into one fine specimen.

From the start of the campaign we also pledged to do best by your amazing support by only setting stretch goals that would improve the game, without negatively affecting core development.

Our next stretch goal, if reached, will be used only to further improve and polish Yooka-Laylee, and give something back for your amazing support. Namely, we’ll release our first post-release DLC pack free of charge for all backers.

When – and only when – we’ve finished and shipped the full version of Yooka-Laylee, we’ll start work on additional content that will be distributed to backers free of charge for their platform of choice. And again, all additional funding will of course go towards improving and polishing the game.

You can donate to the Yooka-Laylee Kickstarter campaign here. It ends on June 16.

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Posted on 9 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in News | 14 Comments

Update: Yooka-Laylee has now reached £1.5 million on Kickstarter, which means that the game will be receiving an orchestral soundtrack (thanks Maxime).

Playtonic shared a first look today at one of Yooka-Laylee’s support characters. It’s none other than Trowzer, who is pictured above.

Playtonic posted the following description of the character on its website:

Trowzer is a business-snake whose career never took off. Not that he knows it – the smug, serpent salesman thinks he’s the bee’s knees (not that he has knees), and for a little dosh he’ll teach you some of the slick moves he picked up on the high-stakes sales floor.

Yooka-Laylee’s creative lead, Gavin Price, shared the following about Trowzer:

Trowzer thinks of himself as the best salesman ever, but with his downbeat appearance and 1980’s mobile phone, life never took off for him. He’ll take your money and count it (he’s an Adder…) and because he knows best he’ll even demonstrate the moves you just bought for you to replicate… if you can follow his jiggling.

Character artist Steve Mayles added:

I didn’t want him to be a snake in the traditional sense, and when Gav suggested he should have shorts on (do I have to add shorts to all of my characters?!), a great idea for this was his body could curl back up through the other leg hole. So he’ll move with a certain springiness, which will be fun to animate.

We’ve now seen three core characters from Yooka-Laylee. Along with Trowzer, players will take control of both Yooka and Laylee. You can read up on their naming origins here.

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Posted on 9 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in News, Wii U eShop | 11 Comments

Yooka-Laylee’s Kickstarter success is no secret. The campaign reached its $270,000 target in under an hour, and has gone on to raise over $2.1 million.

The strong support demonstrated for Yooka-Laylee is leading to a couple of records. First, the title reached $1 million in funding faster than any other game on Kickstarter. It’s also on track to be the most-successful game campaign in the UK.

Developer Playtonic confirmed on Twitter a few minutes ago:

The Yooka-Laylee Kickstarter is located here. Amazingly enough, there are 41 days left before it ends!

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Posted on 9 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in News, Wii U eShop | 3 Comments

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.

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Posted on 9 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in News, Wii U eShop | 31 Comments

Playtonic’s Yooka-Laylee Kickstarter hasn’t slowed down since launching yesterday. The campaign has now raised over £1 million, and all stretch goals have been reached. Yooka-Laylee had already been guaranteed for Wii U, but thanks to the Kickstarter success, it will be on the platform day-one alongside all other consoles.

Here’s a look at all cleared Kickstarter stretch goals:

Next up for Yooka-Laylee is a N64 shader mode and a credits “GK Rap + Video” written by Grant Kirkhope. This will be confirmed at £1.1 million. Also planned is a developer walkthrough and commentary video at £1.2 million.

You can check out Yooka-Laylee on Kickstarter here.

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Posted on 9 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in Videos, Wii U eShop | 17 Comments

Yooka-Laylee composer Grant Kirkhope has shared the first piece of music from Playtonic’s new 3D platformer. The track is simply called “Jungle”, and should play out in the relevant level. You can have a listen below.

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Posted on 9 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in Screenshots, Wii U eShop | 1 Comment

Playtonic released a set of screenshots and art from Yooka-Laylee. You’ll find the full set below.

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Posted on 9 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in General Nintendo, News | 3 Comments

Playtonic intends to create 3D platformer Yooka-Laylee for various platforms, including Wii U. One of the reasons this has been made possible is due to the Unity engine (which the game is built on), as it allows for a great deal of flexibility. Playtonic may encounter some issues along the way, but the team is “looking forward” to bringing Yooka-Laylee to Nintendo’s console, and the team’s passionate Wii U technical director should help in getting it up and running.

The studio’s Gavin Price told MCV:

Our engine, Unity, is multi-platform. But we will see what happens when we try switching on all the dev kits we will be receiving in the future. We have still got that hurdle to come across. But we are looking forward to it. We have a very good technical director, and he is a big Wii U fan. So we will be looking for parity across all the platforms if we can. And it would be nice to take advantage of a few platform features or exclusive content.

The possibility of amiibo support is something that Playtonic has mentioned before. It’s something that the company still hopes to pursue, but there’s no news on that front just yet.

With any big company, these discussions don’t happen as fast as us as a team of seven would like. When we want to do something, we can do it tomorrow. But when you are working with partners, we have to work with them at their speed. So something in that area is still very much in our plans, and there is nothing that is impossible to overcome, so what we do with that we will reveal at the right time. But we know what our own expectations are, because we are fans of this stuff ourselves, so we know what is right and what is expected.

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Posted on 9 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in Videos, Wii U eShop | 1 Comment

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Posted on 9 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in Videos, Wii U eShop | 3 Comments

IGN uploaded a new video for Yooka-Laylee that contains additional footage from the 3D platformer. Just beware of the random video glitches in the site’s video!

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