This article was originally published on March 28, 2025 - read the full issue here

By Patrick Garratt

If GDC 2025 had one "wow" moment, it was Nicolas Doucet's talk outlining the making of Astro Bot, Edge's GOTY for 2024. Of everything shown during a packed week of seminars in San Francisco, nothing else showed a development process in which so much had so obviously gone right.

Doucet's Tokyo-based Team Asobi's staff turned Astro Bot into a reality over three and a half years by focusing on endless player feedback, high-speed iteration, and an unfailing commitment to the design's original vision.

Doucet delivered a great deal of concrete, timeless advice on how to organise and action a console studio project, offering guidance that feels transferable and applicable to any form of collaborative creation. Here are our main takeaways:

1. The importance of preparation

Astro Bot's initial internal pitch went through 23 iterations before even being shown to management outside of the studio. The game's key pillars included "crafted gameplay"; creating a form of "techno-magic" for PS5 (showing off the console's technical capabilities, essentially); a PlayStation brand celebration; and "overflowing charm". This pitch included target render tech constantly used throughout the development process as a quality benchmark. "Generally speaking, we delivered the game quite close to the original piece," Doucet said.

Not quite everything in the original intention went to plan, though. A three-year development timeline stretched by six months, and instead of ramping up to 80 staff, Doucet decided to stick at 65 to allow for longer work on the game with fewer people. "The overall budget remained the same," he said.

2. Cross-discipline brainstorming

Idea generation at Team Asobi is based on small, multi-discipline brainstorming groups. These sessions could include "artists, programmers, animators, audio designers," Doucet explained, meaning it was possible to gather "a wide range of viewpoints."

These ideas are drawn on Post-it notes and stuck to a wall in the studio, which is eventually covered in hundreds of coloured squares. This approach gives rise to "combining functions," a concrete example of which in Astro Bot is the addition of dynamic fluid technology and the DualSense gyroscope, which manifests in the game by being able to pour liquid by tilting the controller.

3. Prototyping, prototyping, prototyping

This was a major part of the presentation, even though a talk focused solely on prototyping had been staged the previous day. All of Astro Bot's mechanics were based on this process. Prototyping, Doucet said, was a critical phase in the game's development, accounting for around a third of the entire production schedule.

Only ten per cent of the ideas generated at the brainstorming stage were selected for prototyping. Programmers own the entire prototyping process at Team Asobi, from creating assets to coding, ensuring faster iteration and tighter mechanics. Prototyping happens in two-week cycles, allowing for rapid feedback and adjustment of mechanics.

Doucet showed examples of how prototyping led to building sumo-style enemies that push Astro back, and how level designers used prototyping to place secret exits. Prototyping, he said, created a solid foundation, enabling the team to focus on polishing the game during production because all of the key mechanics had been refined during this stage.

4. Rhythm, tempo and melody

Astro Bot's action is constructed on "rhythmic gameplay melodies," whereby the team creates chains of moments designed to feel satisfying to the player. Doucet showed a platforming section in which the player was required to "punch, punch, jump over and then drop, punch, punch, champion-punch," creating a sort of rhythm to the play.

Maintaining tempo was also critical to the second-to-second play experience. Astro quickly becomes impatient if the player leaves him for too long, and cutscenes were kept to an absolute minimum to ensure the player remains engaged and actually playing: in 12 hours of play, Astro Bot contains only 12.5 minutes of cutscene, or less than two per cent of game time.

"High tempo is actually a team value that we share," Doucet said.

5. The benefits of simplicity

Every effort was made to keep Astro's control system as simple as possible. Despite the DualSense controller offering 18 inputs, Astro Bot uses only three: one stick and two buttons. Since the target audience was intended to be effectively everyone who uses a PS5, input actions had to be simplified as much as possible.

This extended to guest characters, such as Kratos. In God Of War, there are two buttons to throw and retrieve his axe, but only one is required in Astro Bot. Doucet said the team "took the hit" on using the L1 and L2 buttons as inflation and deflation controls, but he showed clearly in the talk that every single button press in the entire game was a carefully considered decision.

6. Balancing audiences

This need for simplicity and accessibility created a problem in itself: if the control method is simple enough to appeal to the most casual of players, how could Astro Bot also feel like a "gamer's game"?

After deciding not to include a difficulty setting, Doucet and his team instead implemented a game-wide difficulty curve that allows less-committed players to complete the story but included extremely hard levels for those seeking more of a challenge.

"The solution was to have levels on the side that would be really, really hard," Doucet said. The team also added levels with no checkpoints and other challenges "for the people who really want to burp the blood."

One stage was so difficult that "even some programmers complained it was too hard," Doucet revealed.

7. The endless review

Finally, the team would physically review the game every two weeks, to test new features that had been implemented and ensure they were fun enough to stay. These were two-hour sessions including two groups of 30 people, the first 30 minutes of which involved purely socialising.

Doucet conducted these review sessions religiously over the game's entire development period, meaning they took place on over 100 occasions. They included reviews of art, audio and engine updates. Doucet showed video of these events, which were clearly a major part of Astro Bot's development, not to mention its success upon release.

This article was originally published on March 28, 2025 - read the full issue here