Playtonic Games has revealed Rextro Sixtyfourus, a new retro-inspired character set to appear in Yooka-Laylee.
The dinosaur character is designed by Mark Stevenson and comes straight of a 90s 3D platformer, complete with a blocky, polygonal, scan-lined body. He is guardian of the arcade machines hidden across each level. Each world has at least one arcade machine, and completing its retro challenge will earn you another Pagie.
“We decided on using a dinosaur pretty early on as this is a creature that naturally associates with a past era,” Stevenson told IGN. “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.”
Yooka-Laylee is expected to launch for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Wii U, PC, Mac, and Linux in October 2016.