Yooka-Laylee introduces new character Rextro Sixtyfourus
Playtonic has revealed a brand new character for Yooka-Laylee as part of a feature on IGN. Above is a look at Rextro Sixtyfourus, an old-school dinosaur character who acts as guardian of the arcade machines hidden on each level. Players will find at least one secret arcade game in each world, which provides a Pagie when completed.
Mark Stevenson, who previously worked on the Donkey Kong Country series, Donkey Kong 64, and Kameo, designed Rextro Sixtyfourus. Here’s what he had to say about the character:
“We decided on using a dinosaur pretty early on as this is a creature that naturally associates with a past era. Then I think mostly my inspiration came from work I’d done previously on characters for the Donkey Kong 64 game. From this work I knew the kind of forms we had to create due to low polygon counts, so this inspired the shapes used to create Rextro’s blocky feet and hands that are virtually cubes. All the polygons in Rexto have hard edges as well: this affects how the light shines on him meaning you can basically see all the polygon faces as individual facets.
“I wanted Rex to to feel like he captured the era of games from my early career which also included work on the Donkey Kong games on the Super Nintendo. Finally just to reinforce the retro aspect some more, I created a custom shader that creates a scanline effect on Rextro to make him look like he’s being viewed on an old school CRT TV.”
“He evolved quite naturally really, the only part of him that we really took some time to settle on was his accessory around his neck which started out as a red tie very much like Donkey Kong before we settled on a medallion made from one of the game’s Play Tokens to reference his crucially important task.”
Check out the video below for a look at Rextro Sixtyfourus.
