Astro Bot’s director on making a PlayStation icon

Astro Bot is filled with whimsy and silliness that makes you want to pay attention to the details. But in a presentation at this year’s Game Developers Conference, director Nicolas Doucet shared one particular aspect of Astro the robot that I hadn’t noticed but blew me away.

Doucet talked about how Team Asobi worked hard to give the game a good tempo with things like enemy placement and how you can interact with Astro’s spaceship with the DualSense’s gyro controls on loading screens. One thing that kept the momentum going was Astro himself and how he shows his impatience. Doucet showed a video of one idle animation where Astro is hopping up and down on his feet and pointing forward, almost like a little kid that’s demanding you go to the playground.

It’s adorable — and was added “very, very late” in development, Doucet says when I chat with him a few weeks after the presentation. While a lot of games have characters simply breathing or looking left to right while they’re idle, Team Asobi thought that it could do something a little more fun. Since the game is about rescuing characters, the team started to tie the animations to the idea of looking around, Doucet says. The team even reduced the amount of time it takes for the animations to show as a way to more quickly remind the player of the goal to find the bots. Doucet thinks of this as a subliminal way to put players in the mood to move faster.

Astro actually originates from a 2013 PS4 pack-in game called The Playroom that used the PS4 camera. In that game, the robot is named Asobi, but he looks a lot like the charming Astro from Astro Bot: Asobi has big blue eyes and a cute, pudgy robot body. “Back then, the design of the character came from two angles,” Doucet says. One was that the development team didn’t have much time, so they went for a simple character design instead of a human that might require a lot of facial animations.

But they also picked a robot because of where it would be making its debut: a preinstalled game on (at the time) new Sony hardware. When you think about Sony or PlayStation, Doucet says that there is an “aspiration to the future” or something “a little bit science fiction.” Team Asobi uses the term “techno magic.” The robot’s design came from that: “we wanted the playful fun character, but also coupled with something really cool and futuristic.”

The PS5 hardware and Astro might share a lot of similarities — white plastic with black parts and blue lights — but that’s an accident, Doucet says. Instead, both the character designers and hardware team were following similar values.

While it’s flattering to hear that people treat Astro as PlayStation’s mascot, Doucet says that wasn’t the design team’s original intention for the character. Instead, a mascot needs to be something that “grows naturally” and something that the users decide or feel. That happens through repeated consistency and quality, Doucet believes.

In retrospect, the awards for the game — including Game of the Year at The Game Awards — are well deserved, but the goal was primarily to put platformers and family-friendly games back on the map and release “as good a game as we can.” Doucet used to look at renowned PlayStation studios like Naughty Dog (Uncharted, The Last of Us) and Santa Monica Studio (God of War), and think they knew some kind of “black magic” that Team Asobi didn’t.

But following Astro Bot, the takeaway was that “actually, it became the sum of lots of small things that are carefully made.” If the team keeps that consistency and makes sure that “every bit” of the game is done as well as possible, then “the sum of it ends up being high quality.” No wonder Astro is impatient to explore.