Game updates? Nah, don’t’ be silly, ya crazy wotsit! You want yourself a splendid employment notice, that’s what!

Just like Black Friday down Bethnal Green market, we’ve only gone and got ourselves a pukka double deal on a pair of engineers! One of ‘em engineers zeroes and ones, and the other engineers burps and farts… noises, at least.

Introducing Catarina Barros and Dan Murdoch, the latest punters through the twirling Playtonic doors and straight into the Yooka-Laylee grind. Lovely jubbly! Have a read of what they’ve got to say below.

Hello from Cat

Hi there, I’m a programmer. And as a gamer myself, it’s only natural that my passion lies in gameplay mechanics, breathing life into characters and worlds, and just generally making things work! I’m always looking for ways to improve existing features and to carefully craft new experiences.

In the past I have worked on Strike Suit Zero, Angry Birds: Star Wars and Angry Birds: Transformers, working on a variety of gameplay mechanics. While working on those, I was always thinking of new ways to give little quirks that made them unique, funny and gave them character and personality.

When I heard from Playtonic I was ecstatic! I could hardly believe this was happening to me! Yooka-Laylee is exactly the type of game I want to be working on. I grew up playing games with my younger brother, still do, and one of my most treasured memories is playing Crash Bandicoot with him.

I find that nowadays, while I still play a range of game genres, I truly have a soft spot for the magical platforming worlds that offer me an opportunity to escape and explore a totally different setting, a world where anything can happen! This is what I want to bring to Yooka-Laylee, that magic and escapism that made me love playing 3D platformers.

I want to help build this amazing and fantastic world, hoping that someone, somewhere will fondly remember it as fondly as I remember Crash Bandicoot. This is why I make games!

Bonjour from Dan

Yo, I am a sound designer. This means I’m gonna spend the next year sitting alone in dark room making silly noises. I actually studied classical music and composition for years. I was once very ‘high art’, until I got tempted by the dark side. Now I can’t stop buying slide whistles and car horns and other ridiculous noise making things.

I spent a couple of years in London’s indie scene making SFX and tunes for all sorts of quirky games and apps. I then spent a bit over a year as a sound designer at Rocksteady and have just finished off on Batman: Arkham Knight. Then I got invited to Burton-on-Trent to join this motley crew. I signed on the dotted line. No turning back now!

When I was 10 years old I was bought an N64 for my birthday. It came with Banjo Kazooie and Donkey Kong 64. This pretty much formed the blueprint for what I think games should be. I pretty much live and breathe nineties 3D platformers and those games were such a massive part of my childhood. So I pretty much have to keep a lid on all my fan-boy freak-outs when I’m in the office (though it’s hard)!

With Yooka-Laylee’s audio I want to recapture the feel of those old nineties platformers. Having spent a long time making serious and moody SFX it’ll be great to create really colourful and wonderful noises.

Music and instruments were such an important theme in many of the Playtonic team’s past games, so I’m looking forward to seeing what fun ways we can incorporate that this time around.