Astro Bot went through 23 pitch iterations before its director promised PlayStation "happy gameplay" and "overflowing charm," though it did once end with robot decapitation that made "some people really upset"

GOTY winner Astro Bot offers players a family-friendly, super clean galaxy, but getting there took developer Team Asobi a few rewrites to both the game’s early-stage pitch and final ending.

“The original pitch for Astro Bot was written in May, 2021, so, a few months after we began prototyping the game,” studio and game director Nicolas Doucet said at a GDC panel attended by GamesRadar+. “We went through 23 iterations before it was shown to the top management.”

Once the platformer’s pitch was finalized, Doucet said Astro Bot was presented to PlayStation execs in snappy, bubblegum terms like “happy gameplay,” “techno magic,” and “overflowing charm, which is all about art, animation, music, etcetera – all the things that put smiles on peoples’ faces.”

Doucet thinks that, “generally speaking, we delivered the game quite close to the original pitch.” That wasn’t always the plan. Later in his talk at GDC, the director mentioned the rather Lynchian ending Team Asobi had once imagined for Astro Bot [spoilers to follow].

“So, at the end of the game, Astro sacrificed himself for the team, and as the credits roll, we wanted to make a very grieving moment of rebuilding Astro,” Doucet said about Team Asobi’s plan. This, at first, made it seem necessary that Astro Bot should include a “completely dismembered Astro, so you gained the torso without the head.”

This was too much of a haunting image to leave Astro Bot players with, evidently. Upon being confronted with Astro’s maimed corpse, Doucet said “some people [were] really upset in the team, for good reasons.”

After a few tries at an alternate ending, Team Asobi finally landed on a “lighter approach with humor, where the player will replace all the parts, and it still conveys the right emotions. The head is always on Astro’s body,” Doucet reassured everyone.

“But it was an interesting debate that really made us discover our own DNA,” he concluded.

Astro Bot director says precisely what the industry needs to hear: “It’s OK to make a small game” because “players today have a backlog of games” they can’t complete.

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