Astro Bot followers have all heard the story of the creation of the sponge power-up, however do you know developer Team Asobi additionally prototyped even wackier powers, like a espresso grinder and a roulette wheel?
We didn't, till IGN attended GDC 2025, the place Team Asobi studio director Nicolas Doucet gave a discuss merely titled, "The Making of 'ASTRO BOT'". In his discuss, Doucet went in-depth on the method of creating the PlayStation mascot platformer, together with displaying off a quantity of early prototype pictures and cut content material.
Doucet started his discuss by speaking in regards to the initial pitch for Astro Bot, which was written in May 2021, simply a few months after Team Asobi started prototyping it. According to him, there have been 23 totally different revisions of the pitch earlier than it was proven to prime management. Their pitch was apparently initially given as an cute caricature displaying off the principle pillars and actions of the game. Clearly, it was a success.
Next, Doucet defined how the group generated concepts. The reply, unshockingly, is a lot of brainstorming, however what Team Asobi did was type small teams of 5-6 people that blend people from totally different disciplines collectively. Everyone wrote or drew concepts on particular person sticky notes, resulting in this totally unbelievable brainstorming board picture:
Not each concept made it to the following section, prototyping, Doucet stated. In truth, solely round 10% of their brainstorms really acquired made. But that was nonetheless a lot of prototyping. Doucet went on to speak in regards to the significance of prototyping all types of issues, explaining that everybody on the group was inspired to prototype concepts that they had. This included departments outdoors of game design, reminiscent of an instance the place audio designers made a theater inside Astro Bot to prototype haptic controller vibrations that corresponded to totally different sound results, such because the other ways a door can open and close.
Prototyping was so important to the Astro Bot group, Doucet stated, that a few programmers on the group have been reserved to prototype issues that had nothing to do with platforming. That's the place Astro Bot's sponge mechanic got here from – they prototyped a sponge that squeezed dry utilizing the adaptive set off, it was enjoyable, and it grew to become a half of the game.
Doucet shared the above picture, which included a quantity of such prototypes that have been made, however by no means changed into Astro Bot mechanics, alongside people who did. You can see the balloon and sponge, which have been used, alongside prototypes of what seems to be like a tennis game, a little strolling wind-up toy, a roulette wheel, a espresso grinder, and a number of more.
Later within the discuss, Doucet additionally mentioned how ranges have been chosen and designed round sure mechanics. The goal, he stated, was for each degree to have distinctive gameplay of some form and by no means really feel too much like one other degree. While that doesn't imply that Astro Bot might by no means use the identical power-up on more than one degree, Doucet stated that the expression of it needed to be totally different enough every time to make the extent really feel distinctive. For occasion, he confirmed some pictures of a cut degree themed round chook flights that was cut resulting from reusing Astro Bot's monkey power-up in ways in which have been a bit too much like the extent Go-Go Archipelago, in addition to one other degree in Astro's Playroom that had a comparable energy.
"In the end, it was decided that the overlap was not healthy enough to create variety, and we just cut this level entirely," he stated. "We'll never know if that level would have been popular. But in hindsight, I think it's a good thing that we got to spend that time elsewhere."
Finally Doucet closed the discuss by speaking in regards to the game's last scene, and yes, that is Spoilers in the event you haven't completed Astro Bot but. Read on at your own risk.
In the ultimate scene of Astro Bot, the participant reassembles a damaged Astro Bot utilizing limbs and help from the opposite gathered bots. According to Doucet, initially the participant was simply handed a utterly dismembered Astro. No head, no limbs, simply the torso. But Doucet stated that this made some people "really upset", in order that they went with the marginally more intact model we see within the present game.
Doucet's discuss included a quantity of different attention-grabbing nuggets and tidbits in regards to the improvement of Astro Bot. We've spoken to him up to now multiple times in regards to the improvement of Astro Bot, a game that we gave a 9/10 in our review, calling it "A fantastically inventive platformer in its own right, Astro Bot is particularly special for anyone with a place in their heart for PlayStation."
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can discover her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].