A Kickstarter campaign’s a matter of trajectory – knowing there’ll be a moment where it comes to a sickening stop in mid-air, developers have to pick a landing spot that’ll allow them maximum visibility towards the end.
Rare refugees Playtonic Games decided to stage the final crowdfunding push for classical 3D platformer Yooka-Laylee in the middle of E3 madness. Clearly they know something we don’t, because they’ve now raised a total of £2.1 million – including about £50k garnered since the conferences kicked off three days ago.
Yooka-Laylee is intended as follow-up to Banjo-Kazooie, the genre-besting platformer Rare developed for the N64 and have struggled to match since.
Playtonic supporters pledged a little over £2,090,000 through Kickstarter, and a further £30k via PayPal. That’s considerably more than the targeted £175,000, and will allow for extra polish and free post-launch DLC.
The platformer will enter full production immediately, and release somewhere toward the back end of next year.
“We know how to make games, but we didn’t know much about Kickstarters,” admitted a triumphant Playtonic in a Kickstarter update. “We’d taken plenty of advice from plenty of people, but really didn’t know how it would turn out. We were still amending and tweaking the Kickstarter page minutes before we went live.
“The rest of course, is history, but through these past 47 days we’ve felt an incredible level of positive support from everyone, whether they opted to back us or not. For that, we are extremely grateful!”
Meanwhile, Rare have announced a “shared world adventure game” named Sea of Thieves. It looks a bit like this:
What’s your favourite-ever 3D platformer? Never felt freer than in Mario 64, myself.