Yooka-Laylee, the spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie is garnering lots of attention as its release draws closer and closer. The game’s developer, Playtonic Games, has announced a new character for the game, seemingly inspired by Banjo‘s roots in the Nintendo 64 days.
The character, appropriately-named Rextra Sixtyfourus, is a dinosaur-like character that serves as the guardian to the arcade machines hidden on various levels in the game. These arcades are reportedly old-school arcade cabinets, fitting for a game that is reportedly designed after a game that was released in the mid-90s.
Mark Stevenson, designer on Yooka-Laylee, says that the design for the character came along pretty early in the discovery phase of the game, with Stevenson drawing from his work on Donkey Kong 64 as inspiration. Creating the character with a blocky, retro aesthetic was also taken from the low-polygon counts of the Nintendo 64 title. Speaking to IGN, Stevenson says, “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.”
Platonic Games is targeting an October 2016 release date for Yooka-Laylee and is expecting the game to hit Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Wii U at that time.