Group Asobi studio director Nicolas Doucet has some recommendation for GDC 2025 attendees fortunate sufficient to discover a spot in his packed out ‘The making of Astro Bot’ session: “It is okay to make a small recreation.”
They’re pertinent phrases in period of burgeoning manufacturing cycles and budgets—and ones that ought to maintain weight given the important and business efficiency of Group Asobi’s effervescent platformer, Astro Bot.
Introducing his level, Doucet surfaces {a photograph} of Group Asobi’s onboarding handbook that states “we goal for high quality, not amount.” Higher to create a michelin star morsel than a greasy platter of overcooked sliders.
For Doucet, pondering small means gaining extra management over your work and processes. It additionally means your gamers are way more prone to really roll credit—letting you extra successfully compete for his or her restricted time in an more and more saturated market.
“The prospect of a recreation you possibly can really full is a very, actually constructive argument [for small games],” he explains. “That meant being okay with the sport being 12 hours, but when it had been eight hours—and the eight hours had been incredible—we might have settled for that to achieve constant high quality.”
Doucet acknowledges issues over recreation measurement is usually a “troublesome bias” to beat and admits the prospect of creating a smaller title initially sparked discussions in Group Asobi HQ. Ultimately, nevertheless, the workforce realized they might use the advantages of pondering small and compact to take care of a transparent scope and quickly execute on distinctive ideas.
It is a choice that was justified by the truth that Astro Bot was in-built simply three and a half years—solely six months greater than the workforce initially envisioned. Price range was maintained by selecting to regulate the pitch of the studio’s ramp-up curve to accommodate fewer builders over an extended time frame.
With that mantra of ‘simplicity’ in thoughts, Group Asobi grew to become adept at distilling concepts right down to their core all through manufacturing. As an illustration, though the DualSense controller has 18 buttons, the workforce compelled themselves to make the most of as few inputs as potential—counting on quick and lengthy presses and contextual controls to bridge the complexity hole.
The studio additionally simplified a few of Astro’s talents. For instance, they eliminated a 3rd medium-sized Astro Bot from the (completely incredible) degree that sees the titular hero flip right into a sponge to soak up water and develop in measurement.
“[Initially we let players] choose three sizes of sponge: small, medium, and enormous,” says Doucet. “At first it was superb however you then neglect and assume ‘am I small? Am I medium? Am I massive?’ It grew to become too sophisticated so we went for a system that fluctuates between massive and small. As soon as once more, that is bias, as recreation designers we all the time assume that extra is best, but it surely’s not the case.”
Group Asobi sought to take away comparable problems from its hero characters, such because the bot variations of Aloy and Kratos.
With Aloy, the studio ensured slow-motion triggered routinely at any time when gamers goal an enemy along with her bow and arrow. In Horizon, that impact needed to be triggered manually. For Kratos, gamers want solely press one button to hurl and recall his thudding axe. Once more, that is completely different from God of Struggle, which requires completely different button inputs to realize the identical final result.
Doucet says these tweaks had been made in service of simplicity and with an implicit understanding that Astro Bot was concentrating on a special viewers.
That pursuit of ‘much less is extra’ prolonged to different, maybe extra stunning, areas of manufacturing. Doucet explains it pushed the studio to inform a narrative “with a minimal quantity of textual content and no voice over.” He reveals Astro Bot options lower than 5000 phrases—or 4.292 phrases to be actual.
There are additionally solely 12 minutes and 30 seconds of cutscenes in the complete expertise, that means gamers are ‘lively’ roughly 98.3 % of the time.
It is a metric that speaks to the workforce’s perception in creating an buoyant toybox by lowering distractions to champion perpetual participation. There have been different advantages, too.
“It form of struck me in growth, however all of those efforts in direction of simplicity, they’ve really made the sport simpler to share,” muses Doucet. “For instance, the actual fact there isn’t any talent tree—whereas particular person powers are one-shot—signifies that we introduce a brand new mechanic on a regular basis. Which means you would have associates coming to your home, choosing up the sport midway by your marketing campaign, enjoying for the primary time, and nonetheless having a traditional expertise. That turns into actually highly effective after we take into consideration spreading to new audiences.”
In the end, Doucet feels actively pursuing simplicity is usually considered as criminally uncool on the earth of sprawling blockbusters—however maybe that simply means these builders able to squashing that exact insecurity will reap the most important rewards.
“With a view to exist on this very busy world, I feel it is typically higher to accept a great spot in second league, moderately than a foul spot within the high league,” he explains. “As a substitute of becoming a member of the cool fashionable social gathering on a crowded seaside with bars and celebrities, how about you simply search for a bit quiet seaside and have a cool picnic over there?
“Plenty of the alternatives we made with Astro Bot might be labelled double-A or possibly missing in ambition—like the scale of the workforce, the scale of the sport, the actual fact there isn’t any textual content, no voice, and its not an open world. However that does not actually matter. We nonetheless made a recreation that made individuals actually completely satisfied, and actually it was in all probability the simplicity that a variety of gamers made time for.”
