Papo & Yo Update: Monster Evolved

Hello everybody! 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 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.