Yooka-Laylee: introducing Rextro Sixtyfourus, soundtrack sneak peak
Yesterday, Playtonic revealed a new character for Yooka-Laylee (via IGN): Rextro Sixtyfourus. It’s an old-school dinosaur who does look like a character of a 3D platformer from the 90’s. He was designed by Mark Stevenson (who worked on the Donkey Kong Country series, Donkey Kong 64 and Kameo), and he was originally supposed to be revealed during the Kickstarter campaign.
Mark Stevenson explains that a dinosaur is a creature that people immediately associated with the past. To design him, he was mainly inspired by his work on Donkey Kong 64:
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 Rextro 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.
He explains that he wanted Rextro 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”. He even went as far as create a custom shader (creating a scanline effect) to make him look like he’s viewed from a CRT screen.
In Yooka-Laylee, Rextro Sixtyfourus is the guardian of the arcade machines, which are hiden in each level of the game. In each world, there’s at least one secret arcade game, and if you complete its retro challenge, you can claim another Pagie. Mark Stevenson explains that his design is directly linked to his role in the game:
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
Here’s a video introducing Rextro Sixtyfourus and two artworks:
Finally, if you want a sneak peak of the soundtrack, composed by Grant Kirkhope, click here!
Yooka-Laylee comes out next year, on Wii U.
Source: IGN
