Yooka-Laylees world is made of books you unlock by collecting pages

With Yooka-Laylee Kickstarter raising more money than we've had hot dinners, developer Playtonic has revealed the platformer's colourful world will be far more expansive than the likes of Banjo-Kazooie. In fact, you could say its turned a Page when it comes to level design...

"This time around, the worlds will all be contained within these larger magical books and we'll have quite book-ish names for the levels as well," explains studio head Gavin Price in the latest issue of Official PlayStation Magazine. "Sometimes they'll sound more like titles of books when you go into the levels and you'll explore them that way by collecting Pages as well. So you can go into a world, and it'll start off similar to a Banjo level in terms of scope, size and complexity, but then you can spend your Pages expanding the current world or use them to unlock a future world as well."

We've already have an idea of how the duo ofYooka-Laylee will move and behave, but when it comes to how open each level will be, Price says Playtonic is looking to strike balance between the huge open-worlds of modern-day sandboxes and the varied levels of its back catalogue. "We actually wanted to make it so that if players want to go through into one world and then go ahead and see the next word, but still come back later on, they can do that. We're 'de-linearising' the experience."

The latest issue of Official PlayStation Magazine, with Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 on the cover, is out now. Buy it here or subscribe to future issues.

Dom has been a freelance journalist for many years, covering everything from video games to gaming peripherals. Dom has been playing games longer than he'd like to admit, but that hasn't stopped him amassing a small ego's worth of knowledge on all things Tekken, Yakuza and Assassin's Creed.