With the relative success of the Yooka-Laylee Kickstarter, Playtonic Games has begun to open up a bit more about how they’ve worked on the game so far and how they’ll continue to work on it once the Kickstarter is completely finished. Perhaps the most refreshing thing to hear is the developers describing their work environment “just like the Nintendo 64 days.”
One of the biggest things is actually the way we work. We don’t have this massive upfront design doc., which you would be expected to produce if you were at a big publisher. Everyone can sign off on it and have visibility of it, and we’re not like that, we’re a small group of guys who have gone back to how it used to be on the N64.
We are naturally evolving the game bit by bit, trying new things and being experimental. Anyone can chip in with a creative idea from anywhere. [Being independent] has given us the freedom to do those things. Now it means we can do anything, we’re not limited by having to have someone else sign off on it. If we want a pink unicorn riding section in the game, we’ll have one (laughs).
The Yooka-Laylee Kickstarter still has 18 days left to go and has gathered more than $2.6 million dollars in funding, which is far more than the original $250k the team at Playtonic asked to develop the game. With these extra funds, we’ll be seeing the game on more platforms with extra DLC courtesy of the huge amount of money gathered so far.
