Yooka Laylee - 1

Playtonic's spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie and popular Kickstarter project, Yooka-Laylee, aims to recreate the magic of the 3D platform titles of yesteryear with charming characters and classic level design.

With development well underway, creative lead Gavin Price has recently discussed the team's approach to level creation in Yooka-Laylee and how magical books will act as foundations for the game's worlds.

This time around, the worlds will all be contained within these larger magical books and we'll have quite book-ish names for the levels as well...Sometimes they'll sound more like titles of books when you go into the levels and you'll explore them that way by collecting Pages as well. So you can go into a world, and it'll start off similar to a Banjo level in terms of scope, size and complexity, but then you can spend your Pages expanding the current world or use them to unlock a future world as well.

Balance is a primary concern for Playtonic when it comes to Yooka-Laylee's level design. The team wants to draw inspiration from the open-worlds of modern-day sandbox titles while maintaining the level variety and freshness featured in classic games. At the same time the team is striving to create a less linear experience.

We actually wanted to make it so that if players want to go through into one world and then go ahead and see the next word, but still come back later on, they can do that. We're 'de-linearising' the experience.

Let us know in the comments if you like the idea of the level design planned for Yooka-Laylee.

[source gamesradar.com]