The New Face Of PlayStation And The Technomagic Behind Astro Bot

Is Astro, the star of Astro’s Playroom and Astro Bot, a Sony mascot? Nicolas Doucet isn’t so sure. While the soft-spoken head of Team Asobi recognizes that the plucky little robot has the makings of a marquee character, and while it’s become the face of the studio and even graces its logo, he also doesn’t think it’s his or the studio’s place to say. To hear him tell it, a mascot is grown organically out of affection from fans, not a status assigned by corporate masters. On a recent trip to Team Asobi’s studio in Japan, we got an up-close look at how Astro came to be and the design philosophy that drives the studio’s playful, polished little automaton.

Birth of a Baby Robot

It wasn’t long ago that Team Asobi’s work wasn’t meant to be seen directly by consumers at all. It was an internal R&D studio under the umbrella of Sony’s Japan Studio, composed mostly of ex-developers, and devoted to developing tools and techniques for other Sony studios. It didn’t have any grand ambitions to break into game development, but in hindsight, Doucet said the turn toward public development was probably inevitable.

“We were asked to put some of our tech demos, at the time it was PlayStation 4, into the console and that’s when we had to go back into making games,” Doucet said. “But I think honestly over time, probably we would’ve felt the same way, because we were all ex-game developers. There were people who came from projects such as Gravity Rush at the time, and I think sooner or later we would’ve wanted to go back into making full-on games, I’d imagine. So that was a request, but it’s a good one.”

The request came in 2012 to help develop minigames for The Playroom, a showcase for the PS4’s augmented reality (AR) technology using the PlayStation Camera released in 2013. It was composed of only a few minigames, but one of them was a star in the making.

“AR Bots” let you fling little robots into your living room, where they would roam around and interact with each other, or with objects you draw and sling into the screen. The robots didn’t yet have a name, but they bear an unmistakable resemblance to Astro. They look more chrome-plated and lack some of the details of later iterations, but these proto-Astros set the visual style and tone beautifully. Since they were meant to be squat little characters sitting on your living-room floor, the team designed them to have certain baby-like qualities–a rounded tummy and bottom, with a big head and large, accentuated eyes. The studio wanted you to feel protective of the little bots.

You wouldn’t know it from the highest-profile appearance of the AR Bots minigame, which was showcased on an episode of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. In a demo guided by Dr. Richard Marks of PlayStation, the host watched with his characteristic childlike glee as tiny AR robots appeared on stage with him. But it didn’t take long before fellow guest Ice-T noticed that the robots could be kicked, sending one flying forward into camera.

Still, all the pieces were there: adorable, playful little robots who live inside your PlayStation controller. Japan Studio released a few other add-ons for The Playroom with a similar visual style, like the Toy Maker and Ninja Bots games. It had all the makings of a franchise, but it would be years before it received another game, and a more identifiable name.

Sony’s New Tech Showcase

When Sony released The Playroom VR in 2016, the robot character was front and center–complete with a rebranding as Astro. Japan Studio wanted the name to be short, snappy, and easy to pronounce in any language. Plus, Doucet joked, they imagined picking an A-name might put it at the top of alphabetical listings.

The VR game had one short platforming minigame, called Robots Rescue, which was particularly well-received as a standout of the package. That expanded into Astro Bot Rescue Mission in 2018, a full-fledged platforming game exclusive to PSVR. It received glowing reviews, which paved the way for Astro’s Playroom as a pack-in with the PlayStation 5 in 2020, which was also well-received.

Unlike its predecessors, Astro’s Playroom was not meant to show off AR or VR technology, but it was a tech showpiece just the same. This time it was made to explore the possibilities of the new DualSense controller features, like advanced haptics and adaptive triggers. As always, Japan Studio was at the cutting edge of Sony’s latest game tech, and its use of the DualSense was unparalleled. In fact, Doucet pointed out with some pride, many developers still cite it as a high-water mark for DualSense functionality, even years into the PS5 lifespan. And just like the original Playroom demo, a lot of the charm came down to envisioning the little robots as characters living inside your PlayStation hardware, from the DualSense controller to the PS5 itself.

Asobi had successfully navigated the journey from an internal R&D studio to a public-facing developer, but Doucet doesn’t think that its core philosophy changed much in the process.

“Your customer changes, but either way, you don’t make the work for you,” Doucet said. “Whether you are making demos in order to illustrate to share with other studios what they can do with this amazing controller, you have to be able to give up your ideas and say, ‘Okay, we’ve made this for you, but now you can run with it.’ And I think with the game, it’s kind of the same; at some point you let go.

“And a lot of the calls we make have to be for the consumer, have to be for the user, for the players. We’re not making this game for us. Of course, we get to appreciate it, but we must never forget that we are making it for players… For some kids, Astro is going to be this kind of magical moment thing, and we are doing that for them, right? I think either way, whether you do R&D or whether you do the game, you have to somehow put yourself and your own desires on the back foot, and just be a bit more generous perhaps.”

Again and again, Japan Studio had been given the task of showcasing PlayStation tech, and it had consistently risen to the occasion. From an R&D support studio to a public-facing developer, it had come into its own, and the little AR Robot, now firmly renamed Astro, had grown up along with it. It was only a matter of time before the studio got a rebranding of its own.

Becoming Team Asobi

In 2021, Sony announced that the broader Japan Studio would be winding down, and Astro creators Team Asobi would become its own studio. Doucet announced at the time that the studio would be staffing up, and Sony unveiled a new logo that put Astro front and center.

Team Asobi’s name had always been steeped in Japanese culture. The word “asobi” is Japanese for “play.” But Doucet thinks that the Japanese studio’s ties to its home country have also lent themselves to the studio culture and its fondness for classic platformers.

“I think the fact it’s made in Japan, I think is something you should be able to feel in the game,” Doucet said. “There’s a real legacy about this kind of game. When you think about platformers or 3D platformers where the controls were really kind of tight, usually you have a lot of Japanese characters or mascots in mind.

“And I do think that making this game in this country makes sense somehow. There is a culture, they call it the ‘play feel’ in the team. The play feel is really like: controller in hand, the weight of your character and the kind of button input and the kind of reactivity feels right. Underneath that there is a very robust system that just feels good, especially for platforming where every jump is really, really important and you have a tempo to respect. You’ve got to have those rules really worked out well. And I think historically Japanese games, maybe because of the arcade background, I’m not sure where it comes from, but maybe because of that, I think it’s really ingrained in the culture here.”

An All-Ages Philosophy

Part of that sense of playfulness is a focus on making its games appeal to all ages, and that design philosophy permeates every part of its culture. Astro is intentionally cute and appealing to kids and adults alike. The platforming challenges are made to scratch the itch of platformer fans across age demographics, with challenge stages and speedruns for more advanced players. Almost all of its actions are made to be performed with just two buttons: attack and jump. The story and humor are expressed wordlessly, both to bypass language barriers and to be approachable for very young players who may not know how to read. Even elements like the character design of Astro itself are meant to be simple and easy for kids to draw themselves, and with imitable sounds.

Doucet knows that Astro Bot will be someone’s first video game, and you can sense that the team wants to make that a special experience.

“We positioned the studio to be really making colorful games for all ages, and what that means is really [approachable] games,” he said. “We are gamers. We can enjoy [it] because they have tight controls and they have things that as gamers with experience, we feel like we can appreciate. But at the same time, we also have to think about the first memories for some players.

“I remember the first few video games that I played and because of how greatly they were designed, they stayed with me for my whole life. And both of these are really important, I think. When we make something like a platformer, we have to be able to cater for both. So we’ve been building not only the game, but the culture of the team, always around that principle.”

We’re Not In A Tech Demo Anymore

With all this in mind, Doucet pitched an ambitious idea to Sony’s Herman Hulst and Jim Ryan: a full-fledged Astro game, not tied to a particular piece of PlayStation tech but just as reverent and celebratory of PlayStation’s history and iconography. The new 3D platformer would have more than twice the number of worlds as any other Astro game, while also debuting new tech toys that didn’t quite fit in prior Astro experiences.

To sell the idea, the team focused on a few key pillars, some with buzzy portmanteau nicknames, and mapped them onto a spectrum of ages and experience levels that each would appeal to. “Technomagic” was the name given to Asobi’s unique ability to wring delightful surprises out of PlayStation’s technology, and the studio imagined it would carry widespread appeal.

“So the concept of technomagic is to say we take a piece of technology, so it could be the DualSense and the haptic feedback,” Doucet said. “Behind the scenes, we have to be the ones who just make that feel effortlessly magical for the user. That’s really what we’re supposed to do. And so it is this combination of these two things that, it comes as a technology and it comes out as magic. And we need to do that.

“I think a lot of video games do that without necessarily having hardware technology. Sometimes it’s software technology. I’m thinking about games that use physics that are really fun and they become amazing playgrounds. These are technomagic, I’d say.”

And while Astro’s Playroom was a veritable museum of PlayStation history, this new game would be a “PlayStation Fiesta” of references to PlayStation history. That captures not just the story and spirit of the game, as Astro and his robot pals fly around in a spaceship that looks suspiciously like a PS5. But this time Astro would go much deeper with its references to PlayStation history by introducing dozens of VIP characters–recognizable heroes from the past given a robot makeover, some with their own unique crafted stages to emulate their respective famous games. These robots would express their own sometimes-softened personas through their visual style and animations, like the “angrycute” Kratos robot.

Also for the first time, the cameos include third-party characters from outside Sony studios. We saw a pair of featured characters from a popular game series that has a rich history with PlayStation but is not tied to the platform. That was a surprise, but art director Sebastian Brueckner said Team Asobi found third-party developers were very amenable to the idea.

“It is a huge celebration of all PlayStation’s history for the last 30 years,” Brueckner said. “So a lot of our partners actually were really keen when we approached them, ‘Yeah, please, this sounds great. We want to be part of this.’ So it was an unbelievable honor to hear this sort of response from our partners. And we took incredible care of trying to fully and respectfully recreate whatever the essence of these games is and recapture that in the style of our game.”

The pitch was approved and went into full production. That’s when the real work began.

Building a Better Bot

Making a full-fledged platformer that maintains the pace of surprises from Astro’s Playroom was a herculean task, but Team Asobi has developed a workflow to help generate and test new ideas at a rapid pace. And it all starts with Post-It notes.

At idea sessions, the meeting’s leader–sometimes but not necessarily Doucet–will introduce a design challenge or idea they need to solve. Everyone in attendance sketches out a handful of ideas on Post-It notes, which often resemble cartoon storyboards to express the idea behind an attack pattern or character animation. These get hung on the wall, combined, and culled down. The team emphasized that everyone is included in these sessions, programmers and game designers, and there aren’t necessarily clean dividing lines between them. That also means that both programmers and designers need to be able to express their ideas visually, at least well enough to be read at a glance.

Brueckner said that usually designers work on an idea themselves, both sketching and sometimes designing a rough, usable prototype. After designing a power-up, for example, they might design a simple stage layout to put it through its paces for a while before bringing it to the more collaborative phase.

“After this has gone through the first or maybe second or third cycle, usually it’s a lot more ping-pong,” Brueckner said. ” We would come together and work a lot more together and share like, ‘Okay, you work on the first part of the level, I work on the second part of the level,’ and create the art layout for it, for example. And then this kind of grows over time into what essentially later on becomes like a finished level.”

“It’s very iterative, and a lot of the ideas that come in at the start might not make it to the end. But usually the essence, in fact the thing that we found to be the most entertaining, is the one that will carry through that entire stage later on.”

Once an idea has been settled, one designer and programmer are given the task to work collaboratively for two weeks to prototype it. Then the idea gets tested and refined through group playtest sessions. Multiply this process by the significantly expanded studio, and Team Asobi was able to generate a steady stream of ideas for stages, bosses, and surprises.

“As human beings, if we get stuck into something for three months or six months and we’re not too sure whether it’s actually working, and then we found out later that it wasn’t, the disappointment is huge,” Doucet said. “And I think [the process] came also from a desire that if we’re going to do a lot of innovative stuff, we need to know very quickly if it’s sticking.

“So that’s one benefit. And the other benefit of working with these two-week periods is that people get to work on something different regularly. And so it means that you work on a boss for two weeks and then the next two weeks you move on to a power-up or maybe a completely different thing. And so that variety is also really important because if you think about projects for three or four years, you have to be able to get some breaks.”

The rapid prototyping is also aided through a live-link tool that allows designers to make changes to stage layouts that are reflected in a playable state instantaneously. As an example, we were shown a simple stage layout with a series of platforming jumps, which Brueckner suggested were slightly too far apart and broke the tempo of the jumping action. So he brought them closer together to make a smoother experience, and immediately tried the new layout. It’s easy to see how a designer and programmer working collaboratively could test and iterate quickly, so that their design is as polished as it can be before presenting it to the broader team for playtesting.

The studio provided examples of how this rapid prototyping has progressed over time. An early sketch of an enemy that would push Astro was iterated into a sumo wrestler with quick, jerky movements who can’t be damaged through regular means due to its jelly-like body. A “big hands” power-up, which lets you grab walls and carry objects, was an iteration on the monkey suit from Astro’s Playroom, but as an effort to make it more integrated with the standard Astro gameplay. That one in particular went through several iterations of different kinds of stretchy hands, like a robotic backpack that resembled wings, until the team ultimately decided to put a robot monkey on your back after all.

The rapid prototyping means that Doucet, as well as other senior staff, have to be very careful about filtering ideas and driving forward toward the strongest material. But he also stressed the importance of trusting his team to run with an idea and see what sticks.

“First, it generates a lot [of ideas] and so filtering is an important process,” Doucet said. “If you don’t do it properly, it becomes actually not so usable. So soon, when it’s still warm in our heads, that’s when you have to do the filtering. Now, how the selection happens, of course there’s a gut feeling that something ought to work and sometimes it’s obvious.

“But sometimes it’s also, there might be a few of us that think, ‘Okay, this idea [is] not going to work.’ However, the person doing the implementation really believes in it, and we have a quick conversation. But then we have to be able to accept that. If the person doing the execution has the vision for how it’s going to be good, then we have to try it. You have to give them that chance. There’s a lot of ideas in the game that if you’d ask me on paper, is it going to be a good idea? My gut feeling is maybe on the safe side, I would’ve said, ‘Nah, it’s probably going to fail.’ But then the person who did it carried the vision and saw things that I didn’t see. And that’s teamwork; no one person is holding the key to every situation.”

As an example, Doucet pointed out that in the trailer we see Astro shrunk down to miniature size, and at first he was unimpressed by the idea. But he let the developer run with it.

“We’ve seen that a million times. ‘Yeah, it’s Honey, I Shrunk The Kids.’ That was my first reaction, right? But then actually the person implementing that, he was already one step ahead thinking about haptics. So yes, the mechanic itself has been done before, but first he did it really well. But then on top of that, it’s more of a haptic experience. You feel things, normally you have wildlife, and when you’re really tiny, the wildlife becomes gigantic and everything is shaking and you feel it in the controller. I hadn’t projected myself that far, for example, but that person is just like, ‘No, no, no, this is really going to be amazing for haptics.’ Now, he’s a haptic specialist so I can trust him blindly. So we have to have these discussions and it’s the collective of all of this that drives us forward.”

Mascot or Not

With Astro Bot, Team Asobi’s most iconic creation is finally coming into its own with a big, original game. But if he’s destined to become a long-term PlayStation mascot, Doucet says it will be up to the fans, not Asobi or even Sony.

“I don’t feel like it’s for us to decide,” he said. “I think with a lot of mascots, over time through several iterations and there were qualitative iterations, they grew onto people and people adopted them and could associate the brand to these characters, and then they became mascots. But that was decided by the public, not by the designer.”

He says it’s easy to just design a character and make it represent the brand for five years, as many advertising mascots do. But when it comes to a classic iconic mascot like Mickey Mouse, he says, it was just designed to be good and endearing, and then the character grew into the role.

“I think we have to be humble about it. So of course it would be amazing if one day that can be the case, but for the time being, I think we have to solidify the base. We have to continue making great games and then if organically, that happens, I think he’d be great.”

So is Astro a Sony mascot? Like so much else we’ve seen from Team Asobi, it’s about buckling down and doing the work, and letting the rest follow.