Playtonic Games has revealed Rextro Sixtyfourus, a blocky, old-school dinosaur character that will appear in Yooka-Laylee.
Rextro has been created by technical art director Mark Stevenson, who continues to drawn on his experience working on the Donkey Kong Country series, Kameo and, in particular, Donkey Kong 64.
“We decided on using a dinosaur pretty early on as this is a creature that naturally associates with a past era,” Stevenson share with 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.”
Rextro is the guardian of the arcade machines that will be hidden in each of Yooka-Laylee’s worlds, with at least one in each world that will test players with a retro challenge – the reward of which will be a Pagie.
Stevenson continued, “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.”
“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.”
