This month's IGN First is a bit different to ones that have come before - rather than profile a single AAA game all month long, we're spotlighting a different upcoming title each week, beginning with a look at the ongoing development of Yooka-Laylee

Today, we’re kicking things off with the reveal of Rextro Sixtyfourus, an old-school dinosaur character that looks like he’s been ripped straight out of a late 90s 3D platformer, complete with blocky, polygonal, interlaced body. Designed by Mark Stevenson - who worked on the Donkey Kong Country series and was lead artist on Donkey Kong Country 3, Donkey Kong 64 and Kameo – Rextro was originally going to be unveiled during the game’s Kickstarter campaign, but it was ultimately decided to keep him under wraps… until now.

Check Out Rextro in Action in the Video Above

“We decided on using a dinosaur pretty early on as this is a creature that naturally associates with a past era,” says Stevenson. “Then I think mostly my inspiration came from work I’d done previously on characters for the Donkey Kong 64 game. From this work I knew the kind of forms we had to create due to low polygon counts, so this inspired the shapes used to create Rextro’s blocky feet and hands that are virtually cubes. All the polygons in Rexto have hard edges as well: this affects how the light shines on him meaning you can basically see all the polygon faces as individual facets.

“I wanted Rex to to feel like he captured the era of games from my early career which also included work on the Donkey Kong games on the Super Nintendo. Finally just to reinforce the retro aspect some more, I created a custom shader that creates a scanline effect on Rextro to make him look like he’s being viewed on an old school CRT TV.”

Rextro’s role in Yooka-Laylee is as guardian of the arcade machines hidden on each level. Each world hides at least one secret arcade game encasing old-school gaming goodness, and completing its retro challenge will enable you to claim another Pagie. While this explains the decision to make him a dinosaur, it impacted his design in other ways too.

“He evolved quite naturally really, the only part of him that we really took some time to settle on was his accessory around his neck which started out as a red tie very much like Donkey Kong before we settled on a medallion made from one of the game’s Play Tokens to reference his crucially important task,” explains Stevenson.

For more on Yooka-Laylee and an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at development on the upcoming platformer, be sure to check back to IGN tomorrow.

Luke Karmali is IGN's UK News Editor. You too can revel in mediocrity by following him on Twitter