Banjocomet is a dedicated and comprehensive website on the Banjo-Kazooie and Yooka-Laylee franchises, providing information, guides, and the latest news. The aim of the website is to serve as a centralized source of knowledge for the gaming community, while gathering an abundance of information on these iconic games. The creation of Banjocomet was inspired by the creator’s childhood love for video games. The charming gameplay, memorable characters, and engaging storyline of Banjo-Kazooie sparked a deep appreciation for the franchise and ignited the desire to share that knowledge with others. At first, the website was a resource solely for Banjo-Kazooie fans, but it later expanded to include Yooka-Laylee after its announcement, acting as a spiritual successor. Upon playing through Yooka-Laylee, Banjocomet’s creator was transported back to his childhood, captivated by the game’s similarities and nostalgic feel, leading to the addition of information, detailed guides, and the latest news on Yooka-Laylee to Banjocomet’s offerings. In this case, Banjocomet strives to be the ultimate destination for Banjo-Kazooie and Yooka-Laylee fans. With its extensive information, in-depth guides, and up-to-date news, the website serves as a valuable resource, providing a comprehensive knowledge base for the gaming community.
» BK-Discover (2005-2010)
Back in 2005, I had a vivid imagination and a passion for games, especially Banjo-Kazooie. So, I decided to create a website that would cater to all Banjo-Kazooie fans over the world. Despite its humble beginnings, the website was filled with several information about the various locations in the Banjo-Kazooie games. However, I struggled to find a perfect name for it until I had the idea of calling it BK-Discover. A few weeks after I launched the website, I could notice some activities on the website and added a guestbook so that visitors could leave their feedback. The responses I received were overwhelmingly positive, and some visitors encouraged me to expand the website by offering more information and guides about other elements within the games. That feedback motivated me to create additional pages to the website and write in-depth guides that covered many aspects of the Banjo-Kazooie games. As the popularity of BK-Discover grew, I was thrilled and motivated to keep going. By the end of 2010, I decided to take a huge step and overhaul the website by giving it a new look that was more in line with the Banjo-Kazooie aesthetic. I took into account the feedback I had received from visitors around the world and worked hard to create a website that the Banjo-Kazooie community would enjoy. BK-Discover’s new design was a big hit and visitors loved it, which made BK-Discover to continue grow in content and popularity.
» BK-Central (2010-2021)
One year into my journey of improving my Banjo-Kazooie website, I was excited to unveil the new version to the community. The update wasn’t just a few new guides but an entire transformation that included multiple wallpapers, artworks, and other multimedia from the franchise. During the development process, I decided to change the name of the website to BK-Central to reflect the expansion of content beyond just guides. As the website continued to grow, I added new pages filled with in-game content such as soundtracks to enhance the user experience. I was thrilled to receive a positive response from the website’s community who appreciated the range of content and guides on BK-Central. However, some visitors were unhappy with the website’s design and preferred the previous version since certain elements were not there where they actually should have been. Taking into account this feedback, I continued to make improvements to the website and make it more user-friendly. In 2018, I realized that the website was entirely in German, which meant that not everyone could benefit from the information on BK-Central. I contemplated the idea of translating the site into English, but the task was incredibly time-consuming and at the same time overwhelming. Despite this setback, I didn’t give up on the idea. I was determined to create a website, which was accessible to a wider audience, regardless of their language. As you can see, the journey of creating BK-Central was filled with learning and growing. In addition the feedback I received from visitors encouraged me to continue adding content and enhancing BK-Central’s user experience. Although the translation was not feasible at the time, I remained committed to building a website that could cater to a more diverse audience in the future.
» Banjocomet (2022-2024)
In 2022, I was spending a quiet night at home, sitting in front of my PC and tinkering around with some website prototypes that I created just for fun. One of these prototypes gave me an intense feeling of nostalgia for the classic video game, Banjo-Kazooie, whereupon I was so pleased with how it turned out. As time passed, the website started to grow with new content and other useful features, and I found myself dreaming up bigger plans for what I called BK-Universe. Also, I knew I needed to create a permanent name for the site, so I spent some time brainstorming and came up with the name Banjocomet. From there, my next step was to change the hosting provider and start building a brand-new website based on my prototype. I aimed to include all the features as the previous website, but also adding new ones, such as a comment system for each news post on Banjocomet. As I developed the website, I decided to translate all text elements from German to English in order to make it more accessible for users around the world. After seven months of hard work, I was thrilled to publish a preview of the website in the beginning of October. However I quickly realized that I wasn’t satisfied with Banjocomet’s performance as it loaded slowly due to the hosting provider’s bad servers and plugins. For the next few months, the website was offline while I started rebuilding everything from scratch. The reason was, that the premium plans from my last provider were too expensive to upgrade the bandwidth, but also I could not download or backup Banjocomet in any way. As a result, I had to recreate the entire website with WordPress which took some time. But the hard work paid off, and since end of 2022, Banjocomet has been running on new, faster servers! At the same time, I’m so proud of what I have accomplished and am excited to continue building, updating and growing the website Banjocomet in the future.
