‘It’s okay to make a small game:’ Astro Bot director Nicolas Doucet says tiny ideas contain huge potential

Team Asobi studio director Nicolas Doucet has some advice for GDC 2025 attendees lucky enough to find a spot in his packed out ‘The making of Astro Bot’ session: “It’s okay to make a small game.”

They’re pertinent words in era of burgeoning production cycles and budgets—and ones that should hold weight given the critical and commercial performance of Team Asobi’s effervescent platformer, Astro Bot.

Introducing his point, Doucet surfaces a photograph of Team Asobi’s onboarding handbook that states “we aim for quality, not quantity.” Better to create a michelin star morsel than a greasy platter of overcooked sliders.

For Doucet, thinking small means gaining more control over your work and processes. It also means your players are far more likely to actually roll credits—letting you more effectively compete for their limited time in an increasingly saturated market.

“The prospect of a game you can actually complete is a really, really positive argument [for small games],” he explains. “That meant being okay with the game being 12 hours, but if it had been eight hours—and the eight hours were fantastic—we would have settled for that to reach consistent quality.”

Doucet acknowledges concerns over game size can be a “difficult bias” to overcome and admits the prospect of developing a smaller title initially sparked discussions in Team Asobi HQ. Eventually, however, the team realized they could use the benefits of thinking small and compact to maintain a clear scope and rapidly execute on unique concepts.

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It’s a decision that was justified by the fact that Astro Bot was built in just three and a half years—only six months more than the team initially envisioned. Budget was maintained by choosing to adjust the pitch of the studio’s ramp-up curve to accommodate fewer developers over a longer period of time.

With that mantra of ‘simplicity’ in mind, Team Asobi became adept at distilling ideas down to their core throughout production. For instance, although the DualSense controller has 18 buttons, the team forced themselves to utilize as few inputs as possible—relying on short and long presses and contextual controls to bridge the complexity gap.

The studio also simplified some of Astro’s abilities. For example, they removed a third medium-sized Astro Bot from the (utterly fantastic) level that sees the titular hero turn into a sponge to absorb water and grow in size.

“[Initially we let players] select three sizes of sponge: small, medium, and large,” says Doucet. “At first it was fine but then you forget and think ‘am I small? Am I medium? Am I large?’ It became too complicated so we went for a system that fluctuates between big and small. Once again, this is bias, as game designers we always think that more is better, but it’s not the case.”

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Team Asobi sought to remove similar complications from its hero characters, such as the bot versions of Aloy and Kratos.

With Aloy, the studio ensured slow-motion triggered automatically whenever players target an enemy with her bow and arrow. In Horizon, that effect had to be triggered manually. For Kratos, players need only press one button to hurl and recall his thudding axe. Again, that’s different from God of War, which requires different button inputs to achieve the same outcome.

Doucet says those tweaks were made in service of simplicity and with an implicit understanding that Astro Bot was targeting a different audience.

That pursuit of ‘less is more’ extended to other, perhaps more surprising, areas of production. Doucet explains it pushed the studio to tell a story “with a minimum amount of text and no voice over.” He reveals Astro Bot features less than 5000 words—or 4.292 words to be exact.

There are also only 12 minutes and 30 seconds of cutscenes in the entire experience, meaning players are ‘active’ roughly 98.3 percent of the time.

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It’s a metric that speaks to the team’s belief in creating an buoyant toybox by reducing distractions to champion perpetual participation. There were other benefits, too.

“It kind of struck me in development, but all of these efforts towards simplicity, they’ve actually made the game easier to share,” muses Doucet. “For example, the fact there is no skill tree—while individual powers are one-shot—means that we introduce a new mechanic all the time. That means you could have friends coming to your house, picking up the game halfway through your campaign, playing for the first time, and still having a normal experience. That becomes really powerful when we think about spreading to new audiences.”

Ultimately, Doucet feels actively pursuing simplicity is often viewed as criminally uncool in the world of sprawling blockbusters—but perhaps that just means those developers capable of squashing that particular insecurity will reap the biggest rewards.

“In order to exist in this very busy world, I think it’s sometimes better to settle for a good spot in second league, rather than a bad spot in the top league,” he explains. “Instead of joining the cool trendy party on a crowded beach with bars and celebrities, how about you just look for a little quiet beach and have a cool picnic over there?

“A lot of the choices we made with Astro Bot could be labelled double-A or maybe lacking in ambition—like the size of the team, the size of the game, the fact there’s no text, no voice, and its not an open world. But that doesn’t really matter. We still made a game that made people really happy, and in fact it was probably the simplicity that a lot of players made time for.”

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