Few games generated as much joy in their Summer Game Fest demo room as Astro Bot, the latest from Astro’s Playroom, and the Asobi team’s Astro Bot: Rescue Mission. In my three quarters of an hour or so with Astro Bot, I pretty much wiped out its entire demo. I say “just” because while the main missions accessed from the galaxy-style menu were family-friendly, several other hidden bonus missions were far from it, offering a challenge to rival some of the old PlayStation platformers (I’m looking at you, Crash Bandicoot).
“Especially at this level,” explains Nicolas Doucet, founder of Asobi Studios and creative director of Astro Bot, as we languish in an early flamingo-themed world, “we want it to be enjoyable for everyone – but potentially for a very, very young child, we almost wanted it to be like a playground, and that’s going to be the only thing they play.”
At the same time, he continues, “We have to think about the difficulty curve and the challenge of the whole game, so outside of the main path leading to the boss you have these other challenges – and that’s where you’ll find a lot of the PlayStation characters as well.” One of those characters is, of course, Lady Maria from Bloodborne, which Doucet told me has “no secret meaning,” despite the hopes of many fans that this could be some indication of a much-desired Bloodborne sequel, remaster, or PC port.
But back to the idea of the playground, which, as Doucet goes on to explain, it’s clear to me that it exemplifies the kind of deliberate, design thinking that the Asobi team has begun to gain a reputation for. In each level there are small objects, objects or elements of environmental design that serve no purpose other than entertainment. In that first level, for example, petals ripple in small pools of water, a mischievous rodent emerges and hides whenever you approach it, and a diving board launches you high above a large pond that contains more secrets for humans. more determined players who want to complete the level to the fullest.
“When you’re working on these games that are very gameplay-driven, it’s almost like every single interaction is an opportunity for a little ‘playable loop,'” Doucet says. “To the point where it would be nice if the player stopped looking for the level’s goal and instead got sidetracked, you know, chasing butterflies and banging trees and flowers, just because there’s a nice gameplay loop. “
Doucet describes it as a kind of “toy culture”, an approach he links to Astro’s Playroom, a PS5 game that has emphasized the physical aspects of PlayStation hardware over the years – but which also dovetails with Doucet’s earlier career in QA on Lego games and then at EyeToy with the now closed London PlayStation studio. “When I went to PlayStation, I expected to find a completely different kind of company,” he said, before realizing that the lessons of working at Lego “translated” well. “It was very much the same kind of audience, you’re trying to put games in the hands of people who may never have played a game in their life.”
The obvious – and understandable – comparison to Astro Bot is with Nintendo games, especially the company’s 3D platformers like Super Mario Odyssey et al. But beyond the basic comparisons — third-person mascot platforming, jumping on enemies, collecting coins and, in this case, the custom ability gained for each level — there’s a real connection to be made. One is the emphasis on “toy” moments, as Nintendo is often referred to in glowing terms like “toy maker” as well as developer or manufacturer, but there’s also something noticeably Nintendo about the Asobi team itself, its development processes and philosophy. scenes.
Nintendo gave a rare insight into its approach earlier this year with two GDC talks, one about the amazing physics of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and the other about generating ideas for Super Mario Bros. Wonder. There are clear lessons to be learned from both, not only in the general approach that Nintendo takes, but also in the specifics of how they actually develop games, such as dividing teams into miniature prototyping groups with only one person from each discipline. Or getting ideas for post-it notes from the whole team.
Doucet had seen Wonder speak in particular and noted the similarities when I asked him if it was in line with his approach. “We try not to have a lot of the same minds in the room at once,” he said, “so it can be a mix of engineers and artists, maybe we’ll bring in some audio people, animators, and together you come up with ideas.” The team then creates a “catalogue” of ideas, similar to what Nintendo did with Super Mario Wonder, “and literally hundreds of ideas come out – the hardest part is actually thinking, Ok, which one are we prototyping? We can’t prototype them all.
In addition, Doucet has spoken in the past about creating an environment that provides his team with safety, but also, crucially, purpose and meaning. One of the ways Asobi does this is by deliberately creating games that don’t take as long to develop as a typical triple-A project, which Doucet says has “a lot of advantages—first of all, it means you can do something. otherwise with your life, which is important.”
The team also works on two-week “marathons” where they stop each time to have everyone play the game in that two-week period. “If you’re stuck in a tunnel for nine months or one year and you still don’t know where it’s going, it can happen quite a bit, you know… so you’ll always be able to see what the next step is and the light at the end of this mini-tunnel, that’s why we work in these two-week marathons – because they give you a chance to rethink what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, which is really important, isn’t it? to work on this game every morning Why is it important to be able to express that to the team because it makes sense of why we work?
Asobi also has a somewhat unique approach to creativity. While the core development team works on building the game in question, another “B team” works on the side, purely to prototype game ideas – whether they’re new, full-fledged future games, or just neat mechanics that could be used elsewhere. The studio is still prototyping now. “Always, on the side,” says Doucet. “We always keep going because we know the future depends on it.”
An example of this approach already bearing fruit can be seen in the Astro Bot trailer, where at one point Astro gets a power-up that turns him into a large mushroom. “This particular idea was born alongside Astro Bot – we had this team doing the new DualSense tests off the platform. That’s because, Doucet explained, if you include everyone in the main game, “of course you can come up with new ideas — but in a way, your mind is now focused on jumping and running and stuff, and a lot of ideas will automatically be discarded.
“We said: it doesn’t matter, don’t even think about what game you could come up with, just explore some cool stuff with DualSense. And one of them was like a demo where it was just a big sponge where you could put water [in it]and with the adaptive trigger, you can kind of squeeze the water out of it.” The demo reflected the way the sponge was harder to squeeze at first, then quickly became easier as the water left it. I never thought of turning Astro into a sponge, it influenced the demo made outside of it [the team] and gave us confidence.”
In terms of my own experience with Astro Bot, that confidence is palpable. In the three basic levels, I felt the use of DualSense more than in any other PlayStation game, partly due to the sheer simplicity of the controls. Even if we leave family-friendly accessibility aside – take a run around and you’ll notice that the camera does most of the following automatically, for example – the reduced number of inputs means the ones you use are sharper: press both shutter buttons and you can use a pair of extendable hands to grab something, he went back and built the Astra as a catapult, for example.
It’s tempting to reduce Astro Bot to just another bit of PlayStation marketing after Playroom focused so heavily on showing off its hardware alongside the PS5 launch. In fact, developers from the Asobi team originally considered removing the “PlayStation paint,” as Doucet puts it, before changing their minds. “The question came up, ‘Should we do the PlayStation tribute one more time?’ And a lot of the prototypes we’ve done, and the core gameplay of this game is actually really separate from that – it’s about new tweaks and levels inspired by pop culture and classic humor… it could have been.
“But then you think, ‘But why not add that PlayStation skin because it was so good? I mean, if we can do something that’s a step further, why not do it? So we’ve doubled down on it and we’re kind of focusing instead on hardware to the characters.”
Regardless of the finish, the result of the demo I’ve played so far is one of Summer Game Fest’s most joyous experiences. Alongside Lego Horizon Adventures, another hilarious family game to drop, it’s also a significant shift for PlayStation – moving away from their celebratory “sad dad” action epics to games that are not only family-friendly, but a little too. less serious, poke fun at themselves and take a lighter approach to the platform as a whole. It’s a welcome shift – towards the pure design of the platforming genre, and with it the pure joy the genre can bring.
“Obviously Astro is also a game for gamers, we want to make sure we cater to both of those audiences,” Doucet says later in our interview. “But it’s also going to be the first game for maybe a lot of kids out there, so the responsibility is really big. But it’s also really exciting because as a player you have your first memories, [your first] games – and the people who made those games really shaped your life, didn’t they?” As potential first experiences with modern gaming go, I couldn’t think of too many better ones.