"It's a learning curve for us," Playtonic's Gavin Price tells Gamasutra. "Before it was always a closed loop, and the game went out."
"It's a learning curve for us. Before it was always a closed loop, and the game went out. It was almost fire and forget; move on to the next thing."
Last week, we sat down with Playtonic to play Yooka-Laylee and talk to the game’s developers about everything from their experiences running a studio to the difficulties of creating their first multiplatform game.
During the Twitch stream, creative lead Gavin Price shared some interesting insight on that topic and broke down how player feedback is helping the team of former Rare developers pinpoint possible changes to control schemes and other features that will shape the future of Yooka-Laylee.
“From a technical perspective, there [are] a few things that link together with all this,” said Price. “We’ve never been a multi-platform developer before and with regards to controls, you know, it's not until now we’ve realized we have all this feedback to respond to.”
“We’ve realized that actually we should be bearing in mind that the physicality of each platform’s individual default controller needs catering to. So in Unity, we kind of have the same kind of under the hood mappings driving each controller,” said Price. “Now we know, having never been through this process before and we don’t want to repeat the mistake going forward, we need to cater a bit more to specific hardware in that regard.”
Price explained that many of the teams past game development experience has been this sort of quick-fire or closed loop approach where they wouldn’t have much interaction with a title following its release. With Yooka-Laylee, however, Price says Playtonic is adapting to work with players to address feedback after launch.
“I think we’re desperate to show the game more love going forward as well because its great, the response we’ve had from those fans. They help make us who we are and [helped us get to] where we’ve got to so soon. Its only right that we keep talking with them.”
For more like this, be sure to take a look at the entire conversation with Price, software engineer Chris Sutherland, and writer Andy Robinson. And be sure to follow the Gamasutra Twitch channel, where we also stream our editor roundtables and occasional gameplay commentary.
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