To celebrate the upcoming launch, we wanted to share something special with all of you. Although we are a small indie studio, we are lucky to have been able to work with the experienced filmmakers at Rezolution Pictures and talented Montreal director Alfonso Maiorana. They have created an amazing cinematic launch trailer for our game that not only shows the start of Quico’s story, but also the inspiration behind Papo & Yo’s fantastic world. We hope you like it!

Since we are part of Sony’s PSN PLAY promotion this year, PlayStation Plus members can pre-order Papo & Yo starting today for $11.99, and non-subscribers can do the same for $14.99.

You can also get part of that money back if you buy some of the other wonderful PSN PLAY titles from our fellow developers! If you’d like to place your order for Papo & Yo today and get a copy of our pre-order exclusive PS3 theme, visit PlayStation Store.

I look forward to having you all finally play Papo & Yo next week!

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. In Latin America, graffiti is a treasured art form because of its long history with political messaging. Artists work with communities and residents who ask for it, contributing their time and talent to beautify the landscape with spray paint. Several of them are famous for it!

In Papo & Yo, players will notice images of birds, lions and portraits that appear sprayed, drawn, or painted on walls through all five acts. It’s worth noting that these are real works of graffiti art licenced for use in the game, taken from the vibrant street art scene in major cities like Brazil’s Sao Paulo, and Chile’s Valparaiso and Santiago. These cities are so renowned for their graffiti that, while Sao Paulo is a capital of the hip hop graffiti scene, it’s also grown to be one of the top traditional art capitals of the world.

Chile, too, is an international hub for artists and graffiti tourists in search of large canvases and inspiration. The most popular draw is Valparaiso, a bustling San Francisco-like port city where the neighborhoods look like stacked building blocks (like in Papo & Yo), built along hills. There’s an abundance of available surfaces to be blasted with color. Given that it’s a generations-old tradition, there’s a high standard to meet when emulating these works inside the game.

Sebastian Navarro (AKA Charquipunk), Simon Paulo Arancibia Gutierrez (AKA La Robot de Madera) and Inti Castro (AKA INTI) are the three celebrity graffiti artists lending their work to Papo & Yo. Charquipunk is known for his intricately detailed large-scale designs of cats and birds, while La Robot de Madera focuses on elaborate portraits. INTI is known for his work with kusillo, the Altiplano carnival clown whose costumes consist of clothing scraps. When they collaborate, which is often, each artist’s style is still distinct, but their synergy is electric.

Their connection to Papo & Yo game developer, Minority Media, is through Montreal-based Pablo Aravena, a Chilean-born graffiti expert and filmmaker with several documentaries under his belt. These include Next: A Primer on Urban Painting and his upcoming Chile Estyle, which tells the fascinating story of Chilean graffiti evolving from Mexican muralist movements and mural brigades to the hip hop scene today. A longtime friend of Papo & Yo Executive Producer Ernest Webb, Aravena acted as art curator and consultant when it came to the graffiti that appears in the game. Aravena took care to ensure Papo & Yo’s environment is strongly reminiscent of Valparaiso, where subcultures collide into a dynamic tapestry of music, art, food, and personalities — like our three artists, whom he chose specifically. “The graffiti is a natural adaptation of the vibe in the city because it was always known as a bohemian town where dudes play boleros, the sailors get off the ships to party, and there are a lot of different communities,” says Aravena.

With Papo & Yo, the Minority team has tried to create an immersive experience in which players can “get lost.” The game has been categorized as fantastical realism, and there’s a sort of vulnerability that players will take on, simply by “being” in a new place. With the combination of authentically-inspired landscapes and a personally emotional story, that openness to new things is the driving force behind Papo & Yo.

We hope you like it, and keep an eye out for some great stories about Papo & Yo from Los Angeles over the next week!

Hello again! Last time I was here I talked about the redesign of Monster – now I want to give everyone an even closer look at the creative and design process for Papo & Yo in our first-ever dev diary. Please take a look – you’ll get a glimpse of Minority’s office, some new ways you can interact with Monster, and even see the first prototype I designed for the game!

If you’ve been following Papo & Yo‘s development, you know that the game was inspired by my childhood in South America and my relationship with my father. But I don’t want that to be the only thing that people see when they get to play the game. Papo & Yo is also about a child’s imagination, and experiencing “fantastic realities” – transforming the real world into a special world that can both help and challenge you. I feel such joy when I play with my boy and see him imagining his toys coming to life – I hope that everyone will feel this when they play Papo & Yo.

Thank you – and stay tuned! We are working on another dev diary that will give you insight into what went into creating Papo & Yo’s music (hint: it involves a great composer and a big trip to South America). Also, be sure to look out for us at E3 again this year!

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 when I started Minority as a way to make more personal games, he was one of the first people I started talking to. After I came to Nilo with the concept of Papo & Yo, we didn’t talk for a while – I basically buried myself in developing the game. When I finally had a prototype ready, Nilo liked it but saw problems with the way Monster looked – too much like a puppy, he thought. He asked me, “Do you see your father in that character?” and I honestly couldn’t say I did.

Nilo agreed to help us redesign our characters, and our final Monster, which you can see below, is big and powerful. He’s scary, but there is something that attracts you to him – something that makes you want to play with him, help him, even though he’s a beast who could fly into a rage and kill you.

Can’t wait to show you more of Monster and the game in the coming months!

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 on the PlayStation.Blog, 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 once you learn a few basics—Monster is good at moving heavy objects, for example, and Lula can reach high areas inaccessible to Quico—the gameplay becomes surprisingly intuitive.

What really impressed me while playing is how the world changes according to Quico’s actions. Picking up a series of unassuming boxes near a line of houses causes the actual individual houses to lift off the ground and move according to where Quico places the boxes. Placing the boxes inside a nearby chalk outline causes the houses to create a rooftop bridge for Quico to cross. The entire segment really helped highlight the dream-like nature of Papo & Yo’s world.

There is, however, a dark side to Papo & Yo. If Monster happens to come across a poisonous frog (his favorite snack) and eat it, he’ll be thrown into a frenzied rage that puts Quico’s life in danger. Papo & Yo creative director Vander Caballero explained that Monster’s addiction to poisonous frogs is meant as an analogy to his own father’s substance abuse, which greatly affected the developer when he was a young boy (like Quico). Preventing Monster from eating the frogs, or hightailing Quico away from him if he does, is key to survival throughout the game.

There’s still plenty more of Papo & Yo that I can’t wait to see, but the game is already looking and playing wonderfully. Keep your eyes on the PlayStation.Blog for more news down the line.

I have always wanted to tell the story of my childhood, as the difficulties I lived through shaped the man I’ve come to be. But telling my story was a major endeavor for me as an artist. First I had to master videogame design so I could realize my vision; after that, I had to find an appropriate method to tell a difficult story in an engaging way. And finally, I needed to find a group of people who would believe in me and take the risk to dedicate themselves to a project like this. I’m very lucky to have the great, experienced team I have at Minority, who have completely embraced my initial concept.

But what is my story, and why would someone be interested in it, you ask? Well, the tale told in Papo & Yo is about myself and my father, a good man but also an evil one. Like many, he used alcohol and drugs to cope with a challenging life, and I was caught in the middle of it. The emotional core of this game is ultimately a fable about my relationship with my father.

Quico, our young hero, is a boy who lives in the Favelas in South America. His best friend and protector is Monster, a large beast that loves Quico. But Monster is addicted to frogs, and when he eats them he is transformed into an evil killing machine, his fury pushing him to destroy everything that is around him — including Quico. Quico’s only chance for survival is to find a way to cure his best friend.

I remember playing videogames in my difficult childhood days. I remember how the unpleasant world of adults loomed around me and made me feel vulnerable. But I did not feel like that when I was playing as Mario: I felt powerful and in control of a fantastic world. I loved defeating bosses that were larger than life to me, and today I thank you Miyamoto; now is my time to give back.

I’d very much like to thank Sony for helping us bring Papo & Yo to the world in 2012 on PSN! But you will not have to wait until next year to get a look – we will be at the Electronic Entertainment Expo demoing the game, so keep an eye out for a lot more news about the game in the near future!