Nicolas Doucet, the director of Team Asoobi, explained in a talk the development process of Astro Bot, revealing some of his discarded ideas.
Astro Bot It is a full game that has conquered both the public and critic The Game Awards. However, as is usually the case in these cases, not all the ideas that were considered in Team Asoobi They became materialized in this exclusive PS5 title, since there were the occasional that did not pass the cut in the final version.
The ideas discarded from Astro Bot and the importance of prototypes
Now, Nicolas Doucet, director of Team Asoobi, has revealed in a talk held at the GDC 2025 that of all the ideas that were proposed in the session of brainstorming of the game, only 10 % of them went to the prototype phase.
Although it may seem little, Doucet says that 10 % were still many ideas. Despite this, prototypes of all were carried out to encourage all team members to develop the ideas they had, something that not only affected the design team of the game, but also other studio departments, such as audiowho developed a theater within Astro Bot to experiment with the haptic feedback of the Dualsense, causing it to vibrate in one way or another according to the different sound effects that were reproduced, such as when opening or closing a door.
Also Prototypes of things were performed that, apparently, have nothing to do with the “platform” of such a game. The best example of this was when a group of programmers made a prototype of a sponge that we could squeeze using adaptive triggers, something that seemed a lot of fun and ended up integrating as mechanics in one of the transformations of our character.
Other prototypes that were made but failed to move from this phase were A coffee grinder, a tennis minigame, a toy robot, a roulette, a balloon next to two sponges, a horse and more race race and more.
Additionally, Doucet commented that when selecting the levels that were going to move from the prototype phase their mechanics were taken into account so that they always revolved around some new idea that made them completely unique. Obviously, this did not prevent Astro Bot could to repeat the same transformation in several different phases, as long as the use that was given to them was different enough for the experience to be fresh.
This made, for example, A level was discarded whose theme was going to be the flight of birdssince the power of the monkey was used in a very similar way to the Go-Go Archipelago screen.
Finally, he also referred to another discarded idea for the end of the game and how you can suppose, What we are going to explain below is a great Spoilerso we recommend you not to continue reading if you have not finished this fantastic adventure.
If you remember, in the final scene we have to repair Astro Bot rebuilding it, which implies to reposition his arms and legs as they fall. However, The original idea was that we simply had a torso without limbs or head that we had to rebuild little by little. This was something that bothered many members of the development team, which is why they decided to change it in the final version.
