via Team Asobi
Astro Bot is a game filled with fun and imaginative platforming ideas. The creativity behind it is one of the leading reasons it has picked up countless GOTY awards and had anyone and everyone falling in love with it last year. However, for every fantastic idea realised in the final cut of Astro Bot, there were nine that didn’t make the cut.
Astro Bot director Nicolas Doucet revealed a lot of behind-the-scenes info about the game during a presentation at this year’s GDC, some of which is only now being shared with the rest of the world (thanks, IGN). Doucet began at the start of the Astro Bot timeline which was a pitch in May of 2021, only six months after the launch of Astro’s Playroom.
It’s been seven months since the launch of Astro Bot. Maybe that means whatever’s next is already in the works.
After that came the ideas. Doucet shared an image of sticky notes showing off some of the ideas the devs at Team Asobi came up with. You can see in the image that a lot of them, like the sponge power and the penguin swimsuit, made it into the final game three years later. However, those were very much in the minority with 90 percent of the ideas Astro’s devs came up with at that stage in development being left on the cutting room floor.
There Were A Lot Of Great Ideas In Astro Bot
But A Lot More Needed To Be Left Behind
via IGN/Team Asobi
Ideas that were considered good enough to be worth pursuing, but perhaps not typically the kind of thing you’d find in a platformer, were moved on to the prototyping team. Doucet explained that’s how the sponge power came to be. However, a second slide from the presentation shows prototypes that weren’t deemed right for Astro powers. There’s a coffee grinder, a wind-up robot, and a roulette wheel among the prototypes that didn’t make it.
via IGN/Team Asobi
The slides were shown off during the same presentation in which Doucet revealed Astro Bot’s ending was originally going to be quite a bit darker than the one they went with. Rather than the other bots needing to repair a slightly broken Astro, they would have had to effectively rebuild him from scratch, players represented with a headless Astro torso to deal with. Probably wise that they went with something a little less harrowing.
TheGamer also spoke with Doucet about all things Astro Bot ahead of last week’s BAFTA Game Awards. The Team Asobi director talked about raising Astro up as its own thing after the last two games have been a celebration of all things PlayStation, and may have given a glimmer of hope to anyone hoping to see Final Fantasy bots join the game.
