Astro Bot cuts include bird flight levels and headless Astro

Fans of Astro Bot have heard stories about the creation of sponge power, but did you know that the developer Team Asobi restored and even Wackier Powers such as coffee grinders and roulette wheels?

We didn’t have it until IGN attended GDC 2025, where the Asobi Studio Team Doucet team gave a speech, simply called “Production of Astro Bot’s.” In his speech, Doucet conducted in-depth research in the creation of the PlayStation Mascot platform game, including displaying many early prototype images and cut content.

Doucet began talking about the initial pitch of Astro Bot, the speech was written in May 2021, a few months after the Asobi team began producing it. According to him, there were 23 different revisions before the stadium was proven to be top management. Apparently, their tones were initially shown as adorable comics, showing the main pillars and activities of the game. Obviously, this is a success.

Next, Doucet explains how the team has come up with ideas. The answer is unshakable, it's a lot of brainstorming, but what the Asobi team does is to form a group of 5-6 people who mix individuals from different disciplines together. Everyone writes or comes up with ideas on separate sticky notes, resulting in this absolutely incredible brainstorming board image:

Dussett said not every idea is entering the next stage. Actually, there is only about 10% brainstorming. But this is still a lot of prototype. Doucet continues to talk about the importance of making various things and explains that everyone on the team is encouraged to prototype their own prototype ideas. This includes departments outside of game design, for example, audio designers have created a theater inside Astro Bot that vibrates with a prototype haptic controller that corresponds to different sound effects, such as different ways in which doors can be opened and closed.

Doucet said prototyping was so important to the Astro Bot team that some programmers on that team kept the prototype stuff that was not related to the platform. That's where Astro Bot's sponge mechanics came from – they prototyped a sponge that was squeezed and dried using an adaptive trigger, which was fun and became part of the game.

DOUCET shares the image above, which includes many of these prototypes made, but never combines it with Astro Robot Mechanics and those that are made. You can see the balloons and sponges used, as well as prototypes that look like tennis games, a small walking punching toy, roulette wheels, coffee grinders, etc.

Later in the speech, Doucet also discussed how to select and design certain mechanisms at the level. The goal is that each level has some unique gameplay and never feels too similar to other levels, he said. While that doesn't mean that the Astro Bot can never use the same power supply on more than one level, Doucet says its expression must be different enough each time to make the level unique. For example, he shows some images of cutting levels around birds flying, which were cut due to reuse of monkeys at Astro Bot in a somewhat similar way to the Level-Go-Go-Go archipelago, and another level of Astro Playroom, with similar powers.

“In the end, the decision overlap wasn't healthy enough to create diversity, and we just cut that level completely,” he said. “We would never know if this level would be popular. But in hindsight, I think it's a while we've been spending elsewhere.”

Finally ended the speech by talking about the final scene of the game, yes, this is Spoiler, if you haven't finished Astro Bot. Read at your own risk.

In the final scene of Astro Bot, the player reassembles a broken Astro robot using the help of limbs and other gathered robots. According to Doucet, initially, the player had just been given a completely dismembered Astro. No head, no limbs, just torso. But Doucet said that it “really frustrated” some people, so they used a more complete version we've seen in existing games.

Doucet's speech included many other interesting Nuggets and tidbits about Astro Bot development. We've Talk to him in the past repeatedly About the development of Astro Bot, this is our game Gived 9/10 in our commentcalling it “Astro Bot is a wonderfully creative platformer in itself, especially special for anyone who has a place in PlayStation's heart.”

Rebekah Valentine is a senior journalist at IGN. You can find her post on bluesky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Is there a story tip? Send it to [email protected].