42w ago - Minority Creative Director Vander Caballero has confirmed today that grafitti is part of the experience in Papo & Yo for PS3 on PlayStation Network.

To quote: Hey everyone, Vander here. In my development career, I have never worked with authentic artists from the game's locale.

The project's art director is usually instructed to mimic what he can find from reference pictures. But in Papo & Yo, I didn't want to do the same thing.

I wanted it to be genuine. And I wanted local artists on the other side of the continent to have access to the beautiful canvas of video games.

Here's the full story from Deborah Chantson, our community manager.

As you might know, Papo & Yo is a metaphorical, semi-autobiographical story of Creative Director Vander Caballero's tumultuous relationship with his alcoholic father.

While the game's storyline will draw players into an emotional journey, we also designed the environment to help immerse the player in a surreal Latin American setting. There's a high level of authenticity on display, from the landscape to the music, style, and graffiti.

In North America, graffiti is changing to include more artistic works such as murals, but it's generally associated with spray painted tags and defaced walls....

64w ago - Minority Creative Director Vander Caballero has shared a pre-GDC 2012 update today with fans on Papo & Yo: Monster Evolved below.

To quote: We've been hard at work since we first unveiled Papo & Yo last summer, and the game has come a long way in the past few months.

As we get ready to (finally!) show off more of the game next week at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, I wanted to take the opportunity to tell you all a little bit about how Monster - a character very important to both the story and to me personally - has evolved since my initial concept into the Monster you see today.

If you've been following Papo & Yo, you may remember that Monster represents my father, a man I had a difficult relationship with. To tell the story I wanted to tell - my story - I knew that this character had to show the positive aspects of the man I loved... and the negative aspects of the man I feared.

This turned out to be challenging - I knew who Monster was, but not what he looked like. Luckily, I'm extremely fortunate to have friends like Nilo Rodis, a man who has worked on the art for movies ranging from Pixar titles to Star Wars, and the man who helped me find my father in Monster.

Nilo and I met during my time at EA, and...

99w ago - Today PlayStation Correspondent Andy Burt has shared details from developer Minority's introduction to the dream-like world of Papo & Yo on PSN.

To quote: Puzzle-platformers are no rare breed on PSN, but one upcoming title, Papo & Yo, is looking to revitalize the genre in a number of intriguing ways.

Introduced in early June, Papo & Yo tells the story of Quico, a young boy who has an unlikely best friend: a giant hulking beast named, appropriately, Monster. Together, the duo must navigate an ethereal world that's reminiscent of a South American town but is set entirely in Quico's imagination. The world itself is made up of dream-like neighborhoods to roam and populated with puzzles to solve.

After getting my hands on the game at E3, it didn't take long to notice the unique approach developer Minority is taking when it comes to navigation and puzzle solving. Controlling Quico from a third-person perspective, I wandered a bit around Papo & Yo's surreal world.

Players can easily run and jump around the expansive environments, and also use visual cues to direct Monster (as well as a cute little flying robot named Lula) to points of interest. Utilizing all three characters to solve puzzles is key to progressing in the game, and...