Behind the scenes of Astro Bot: Team Asobi studio director tells about the team's approach to creating the best game of 2024
Thanks to Team Asobi studio director Nicolas Doucet's presentation at GDC 2025 dedicated to the creation of Astro Bot, we were told in detail about the development process of the platformer that became the PlayStation mascot, showing early prototypes and cut content.
Here's What We Know
Doucet started his story with the first Astro Bot pitch written in May 2021, just a few months after prototyping began. According to him, 23 different versions of the pitch were created before showing the idea to senior management. Initially, the idea was presented in the form of a comic book that demonstrated the basic mechanics and activities of the game. Obviously, it worked.
Next, Doucet explained how the team generated ideas. Unsurprisingly, it was an active brainstorming session, but Team Asobi organised this process in small groups of 5-6 people, bringing together representatives of different specialities. Everyone wrote down or sketched their ideas on separate post-it notes, which resulted in an incredibly busy brainstorming board.
However, not every idea made it to the next stage - prototyping, Doucet said. In fact, only about 10% of all ideas were turned into prototypes. But even that turned out to be a significant amount of work. Doucet emphasised the importance of prototyping a variety of things, encouraging every team member to prototype their ideas. This was not only true for the game design department. For example, the sound designers created a virtual theatre in Astro Bot to test the tactile feedback of the controller that corresponded to different sound effects, such as different ways of opening and closing doors.
Prototyping was so important to the Astro Bot team, Doucet said, that several programmers were prototyping things that weren't directly related to platforming. That's how the sponge mechanic came about - they prototyped a sponge that could be squeezed using adaptive triggers. It turned out to be a fun idea, and it became part of the game.
Doucet showed an image that showed both the implemented mechanics (ball and sponge) and numerous prototypes that never made it to Astro Bot: a prototype of a tennis game, a roulette wheel, a coffee grinder, and more.
Later in his presentation, Doucet also spoke about how the levels were selected and developed based on certain mechanics. According to him, the goal was to make each level unique in terms of gameplay so that they did not seem similar. While this didn't mean that Astro Bot could never use the same boost across multiple levels, Doucet stressed that its implementation had to be different enough each time to make the level feel unique. For example, he showed an image of a cutaway level on bird flight that was cancelled due to the overly similar use of Astro Bot's monkey amplification in the Go-Go Archipelago level, as well as another level in Astro's Playroom.
Finally, Doucet spoke about the final scene of the game(spoiler alert for those who haven't played Astro Bot yet!).
In the final scene, the player puts together a broken Astro Bot using the limbs and help of other collected bots. According to Doucet, at first the player was just given a completely dismembered Astro: no head, no limbs, just a torso. But Doucet said that this was "very upsetting" to some people, so they settled on a slightly more complete version that we see in the game.
And you can learn more about the adorable Astro Bot in our review here.
Source: IGN
