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Welcome to The Game Maker's Notebook, a podcast featuring a series of in -depth, one -on -one conversations between game makers providing a thoughtful, intimate perspective on the business and craft of interactive entertainment.
The Game Maker's Notebook is presented by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, a member -driven organization dedicated to the recognition and advancement of interactive entertainment.
So, Nicholas, I'm so happy sitting down here in the DICE Summit.
I mean, the same day the DICE Awards was happening.
And when people listen to our conversations, people know the result.
So I would say, as an anticipation, congratulations for your win.
At least maybe one win.
How many you are nominated today?
Actually, six. Six nominations.
But let's hope there's at least one.
Otherwise, it's going to sound very bad.
Yeah. Yeah, six nominations, including Game of the Year, right?
Yes. So how are you feeling, that big win at the Game Awards, right?
Yeah, well, we're still thinking about it as this magic moment in our careers.
Yeah. And it's really had a good effect.
I mean, the team, you know, when you make a game and you finish it, usually a little bit tense.
You never know how it's going to turn out.
But having the confirmation that it went okay, that it went well, very well very well and then I think it makes everyone feel more relaxed and you almost get like a a second wind and you know you feel you can take on anything you know which at the same time is something that we're gonna have to also like be careful about because we have to never forget how to be you know challengers yeah absolutely you have still long career ahead and all your team but this was your first game of the year award actually we had one for VR for game of the year Best Game of the Year.
That was the first time that we got into that category.
You got Best VR Game of the Year award. That was some years ago.
Astro Boat Rescue Mission.
That's right. Talking about career, let's go back when you were young.
Maybe you were a gamer.
How did you get into the industry?
Into the industry. I'm from the south of France.
I lived in a countryside And I have to explain A little bit about my childhood To make the connection I'm from the I grew up in the 80s I was born in 1978 In France, there was a big influence Of Japanese culture Through animation And things like that Much more than from America, for example It was like, on TV It was almost 100 % Japanese animation Oh, okay, I didn't know.
So the French people and I think Spanish, Italians, like the South of Europe have that connection.
So we grew up really loving that flavor, right?
And over time, we also started understanding that the video games we played as kids, like, you know, on Nintendo and Sega, actually were not made near Earth.
They were made in Japan as well.
for amazing speech you did as acceptance for the best game of the year at the game about you know you thank Nintendo for making all these great games yeah we grew up playing those games and they really forged you know our senses and our love for certain things and you know an idea of quality right and so as we grew up a little bit older we started working in the summer in like like fields, and, you know, to make a bit of money to buy consoles from Japan.
Okay, okay. So, when I was 15, I think, I played, for example, The Legend of Zelda.
Oh, wow. On Super Famicom, or in Japanese.
Yeah. So, I didn't understand anything.
Oh, really? No. You played in Japanese?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there was no, like, guidebooks or anything back then.
We just have to work it out.
Usually, you try everything and eventually...
There's no Google app to translate, right?
None of that. And dictionaries as well, you know, very, very complicated.
So a lot of us developed that kind of love for understanding that those games were made far away in Japan.
And also they came to Europe two years later.
Back then, it was a long delay.
Oh, yeah, yeah, that was the time.
So we really felt like we were playing cutting -edge stuff.
So then later, when I turned 18, I graduated, and I did some literature studies.
studies, and I thought, okay, becoming a teacher, English teacher would be a nice job because I think, I wasn't at the impression...
French people need English teachers.
Yeah, you know, yeah.
A good teacher is always neat, I think, and I felt like there will be a lot of holidays.
So, you know, so I went to England and thinking I'm going to stay there for about six months to learn English and then quickly come back and try to, you know, graduate quicker or, you know.
So I went to London and I started working in cafes and things like that.
And then completely by accident, it was the beginning of the Internet.
And I had access to a computer for the first time.
You know, like email addresses and stuff like that.
It was like at the time it was AOL and Yahoo and this kind of thing.
Netscape. I was like a navigator.
And the friends told me, oh, from France, he said there is an application for job in games.
You really have to try it.
this is for Eidos to be a localization tester.
And I sent a motivation letter and I would love to read it again today because it was probably like very naive and innocent.
You know, I love video games.
I play this, this and that, you know.
But what happened is actually the guy in charge, another French person at Eidos, you know, he was looking for, you know, back then there were only five languages being localized.
So he was looking for a French, a Spanish, a German, an Italian.
in Figue right yeah yeah yeah that's it yeah and um he called me at home we had a conversation over the phone and then he went okay that was on a friday night yeah can you start monday that was it oh wow so next thing i knew i was in in a job with the playstation on my desk localizing you know testing a football game a soccer game um uh and that was it and you know of course i never went home i never continued i never went back to to never i never went to university in the end i just continued and from small jobs to small jobs in the industry i worked at idos at ea as well i'd worked at the bullfrog
you know which was peter molinos company yeah that was really really uh fun fun times uh so you started in the qa department yeah And in EA what did you do?
Same thing. So, testing, yeah.
So, testing games on PC and that was the beginning of online multiplayer as well with Dungeon Keeper 2, it was called.
Really, really great experience.
And then finally I got my first permanent job at Lego.
Oh, OK. So, Blue Frog was still part -time.
Yeah, part -time contractual.
You know, you get like a three -month mission and then once it's over, if there's more work, you stay.
but if there's no more work, you know, you have to go.
So I went to Lego, and at the time, Lego were just making their first game division.
You know, so today, you know, they've made many, many, many games, but at the time, it was mostly PC.
Yeah, but they license typically, right?
But at that time, they're making games by themselves.
That's right. Very right, actually.
That's right. It was actually a division inside of Lego, they had many names they changed names every year Lego software Lego media Lego virtual Lego games Lego everything and I became a full time employee there because I had a little bit of experience in QA I was asked to lead a team and help form the QA department and there were fun times because we were making games we were opening up from PC to console so I got to bring games like Lego racers I remember on PS1 Nintendo 64 Gameboy Color we also touched Xbox so it was like you know I got to see all the platforms from the the QA point of view
that was really really good yeah so I spent six years at LEGO and I was in that time that I became an assistant producer so at the end of that those six years I transitioned over and after working in QA for a long time you know it's a good entry I think QA in the industry because always is a good way to enter the industry because you get to see the end you get to see actually a moment where there's a lot of tension as well and you also get to interface with um the development team usually through a producer right yeah so you get to see how a producer who is somebody who deals with many many things
at the same time gets to do their work yeah yeah so that gave me the desire to become a producer.
So I asked if I could leave QA and somebody took me under their wing to...
Yeah, I remember when I was producing games and typically when the game testers they give really good feedback we used to poach them into the game team.
So maybe something like that happened to you.
Exactly. You get a sense that that, oh, you know, they have a sense, they can maybe like, you know, communicate or they can maybe like, they have a good eye for maybe quality.
So it's always a good place to look for the next line of junior managers, I think, yeah, or producers.
So I did a little bit of that and that's when we entered the phase of, you know, Lego Star Wars and all the great Lego games starting appearing through that licensing.
And then the business kind of moved.
I was still in England and you moved to the north of England so I was thinking I was in London and I wanted to remain around London so I applied for three companies I thought to myself okay so three companies were either Sony or Sega I think there was a love from a young age as well and actually the other one was Ubisoft and I was at the time Ubisoft it was the moment were really like they they were really pushing innovation they were making games that were always like um always groundbreaking you know they were doing like prince of persia on ps2 and you could stop time and you could rewind time
and stuff like that and it was like you know technically technical level was very high so I went to sega and I had the interview of hell if you want later I'll tell you what happened but I mean basically it was the interview everything went wrong and the following week I went to playstation and everything went right and I couldn't do Playstation so that was PS2 period?
PS2 era, 2004 in October and it was at the moment everything was it was still like a bit of gold rush because on PS2 you could still try so many things, I mean you can still try many things but back then it was like especially I joined a team that was doing Ito and SingStar especially our European studios studios did itoy and syncsters and buzz you know came up with something really interesting and very broader market yeah exactly and there was the mindset and what was really interesting is i came from lego where you know we dealt with a lot of people who don't play games or are so young that you
have to be really careful about you know usability and i was thinking okay i'm stepping into the hardcore gamers area but in fact not at all with london studio it was very much again the How do we play video games without a controller?
Right. How do we play with a granny?
Well, on one hand, London Studio made the Getaway the most hardcore games, right?
And on the other hand, they made the iToy that you can play without a controller.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Amazing variety.
Yeah, amazing variety.
And I think it was really interesting to see that also the PlayStation as a whole really went from parappa And even there were some kind of games that were even from a preschool kind of style game all the way to God of War and Gran Turismo.
They were like, you know.
Matur. Yeah. And that thought of like, you know, this kind of very wide offering is a thought that never left me.
That's why today I think also I work on these kind of games for, you know, that are really for everyone.
one because it was a bit by accident that i was always exposed to these games that are not for gamers but myself i'm a gamer right you know so growing up and you know these days i played like elden ring and you know i play right now i'm playing metaphor you know it's kind of but making games for a different audience it's really exciting you know um it's extra hard right yeah to make the game easy to play and you have to imagine to be someone else yeah you have to And I like that challenge because there's something really, it's a real challenge to put yourself in the head of somebody discovering
games for the first time.
And maybe because I'm quite a nostalgic person, maybe it makes me remember what it was like to have those first experiences.
The first time you see video games, you see them moving on the screen, something magical going on, and then your brain is kind of, you know.
So all of that was really great to be in London back then.
Can you explain for people who may not have experienced iToy back in the day, how did it work?
So back then, webcams on PC were starting to boom.
So you would install a USB little camera on your PC and you could do video chat for the first time.
So that was like the start of video conversation on computers.
computers and one of the scientists one of our uh yeah scientists you said playstation uh richard marx yeah right came up with this idea of bringing this camera attaching it to a playstation console and then developing games in which the you know the uh the your body being recognized on the screen would allow you to play games so you would stand in front of a screen you would see an image of yourself in the screen so place the camera on top of the tv yes yeah yeah on top of looking at you that's right and so you would be inside the game and by moving your body you know you're in front of a mirror and by moving
your body you know you could wash windows or punch characters or do something i remember that demo wash window demo was amazing everybody a big smile on his face when he tried it yeah it's super accessible stuff right now i remember I remember seeing it, even when I was at Lego, and I walked in, there was a game show in London called ECTS, I think.
And I walk past the PlayStation booth and I saw all these people jumping up and down without a controller in their hands, playing the game and thinking, what is going on?
Is this really PlayStation?
And it was, I understood later on, that was a prototype of a toy they were showing.
So it's the beginning of motion gaming, like this kind of idea of playing with natural inputs um and again yeah it was a really really fun area to be so from there we moved on to ps3 and ps3 was a little bit trickier because you know it was like a high -end yeah yeah hardware yeah so that made um you know touching family audiences much harder because you know it was an expensive piece of kit and stuff yep but that's when we met yeah yeah yeah i remember You know, clearly that you are making eye toy game on PS3 and the game was called iPad.
You know, so there's a virtual pet in the, in the screen that you can interact with them.
And when you draw, draw something like a plane that becomes the plane in the game and fly around or something like that.
And the, and the pet chases it.
Amazing experience.
and at that time I had two young daughters, and they loved playing the game, so you kept making eye -toy kind of game.
Yeah. So we kept trying to break into new grounds of making technology something magical, and we...
Oh, that's a PS Move game, now I remember.
Yeah. And then it was turned into a PS Move.
for the PS Move launch line up so we worked through that game and then that's when so that was about 2009 yes I remember and it was interesting to kind of have to grade everything through a new console life cycle where it's interesting how an audience you have it with PS2 very easily and suddenly the audience is hard to reach with ps3 just because the hardware price yeah is in is in the way that was a very interesting lesson about just keeping things simple of course we can't control these things you know they you know they are off our hands but makes me feel like okay um you know that was like
a hurdle a difficult hurdle to get over yeah and then in 2010 yeah I asked to move to Japan.
Do you remember what happened?
Maybe I received an email from you.
Yes. And so I was president of Worldwide Studio, right?
So you are one of the producers in London Studio.
Yes. And somehow you skipped your boss and your boss's boss and came directly to me.
Yes. And said, can I move to Japan and work in Japan Studio?
Was it? Exactly. So I was at home.
remember it was on a sunday and um are you drinking no no i was not drinking i was totally fine but i was thinking okay um going into another cycle of like maybe three years and and you know going back to my childhood it was like a kid's dream right and when i entered playstation it crossed my mind it's a japanese company maybe one day there's a chance but then you know soon after i got busy and you know didn't do anything with it so that was like six years in in London studio and um so yeah I I thought you know let's try it you know Xuhei is super approachable because you used to come and you
used to talk to us and make us feel like you know you would really talk to members of the team walk around and there wasn't this idea of just like you know management talking to management you know you would you would be so approachable to us so I think that made me feel like comfortable and you know sometimes you just gotta try things things.
And so I went straight to you and in four hours you replied to me first, you sent me a first email and you went, very good idea.
Let's do that. That was it.
And I was thinking, Oh my God, I can't turn around.
I can't turn back now.
That's it. I was looking around my home thinking I'm going to have to move out.
English life is over.
And then you sent another email saying, oh, by the way, let me CC all the people you skipped, you know, my boss and my boss.
I forced the issue to all of them and I don't know what happened were they angry?
they were very supportive good for you you developed that relationship with your bosses so I wouldn't advise to bend the rules to people but at the same time in hindsight I think if I had maybe gone through the normal order of things people get busy and it's possible it would have never happened so I'm really thankful to you more thankful to you know sometimes that one email right that change your life and i was so happy because you know i knew you you know i knew what you were making and you could add some new idea fresh idea perspective to the japan team so yeah and it was um it was an amazing
life experience because uh you know at worst case it would be a few years you know and in best case it would be more and you know now looking back it's been uh 11 years no more than that 13 years 2011 so 14 years 14 years so i spent more time almost as much time in japan than i did in england wow so what was your first product project in japan studio so japan studio when so i have in 2011 and at first i was trying to make myself useful so when it's it's interesting kind of learning from there because when i transitioned over there wasn't a set a job that was really set for me so i left a team
behind you know in london that got taken over by different management and i arrived by myself so first question is okay i cannot speak japanese how do i make myself useful to this group right so i proposed several positions and one of them was to try and be advising about the style that maybe western games tend to like very different position to be in Because you know having to kind of critique other people's work and visions When some of them come, you know with the background that is amazing, right because I had a very strong respect for the creators of Japan Studio But in case there were some
modifications we could make or I could kind of you know Maybe bring a bit of light on some things, you know, so I tried to do a little bit of them It didn't really change much if I'm honest, you know, he was more like okay, you know, I would be trying to show me like different costumes for very, very, very kind of Japanese looking characters like is it better blue or green or red and actually the kind of changes are more it's more profound right it's about you know hairstyles and sometimes often times Japanese people are nice but stubborn right yeah it was that too and you know so that was one
thing but we tried to do it and by doing that I built relationship with the local people and they were very, very kind to me as well you know we went through this kind of really difficult time with the earthquake oh yeah right after you landed yeah just after I arrived so during the first year it was like a lot of things happened that were very more on the kind of like you know I remember when the earthquake many non -Japanese people flew back to their original country but you stayed I stayed I had just arrived it was something that you know all my life had been you know and And so my family went
down the south, like, you know, a bit further away.
But I stayed in, you know, near Tokyo.
And I was thinking, hold on, you know, I've just been welcomed with this amazing life chance.
And it's, you know, how would I feel if I just, like, left and, you know, people are also left behind.
So I'm not making a judgment because it's difficult.
During those times, it's very, very hard to, there's no right and wrong.
but I felt a duty to stay and so good to see that year unfold and if you remember the Tokyo Game Show that year it was almost very dark power saving and stuff it's affecting a lot of parts of society and stuff and then on the other end of that we kind of recovered a little bit and at the time Alan Becker was running Japan Studio studio and I was knocking at his door every week saying, I need to get busy, I need to get busy, you know, because, you know, not having a everyday work sometimes can be, you know, quite, quite...
Alan is an amazing person.
I worked with him for the longest time.
You know, he was the lead producer of Crash Bandicoot in the US.
Actually, Connie Booth was the lead producer and Alan was her boss and I was a localization producer for Clash Bandicoot and that was 1996 so I worked with Alan you know over you know almost like 30 years oh wow wow you guys go back a long way yeah yeah and he is you know half Japanese half American and so he looks like American but in his heart he's Japanese so very very complex kind of person very deep thinking yes right and he He really always supported innovation.
Every time I spoke with Alan and asked how you pick one game to make and the other, he always had one question to the developer.
After the developer pitches games, at the end of the meeting, he asked the developer, okay, so I understood this pitch, but what do you really want to make?
like and that's how he you know tried to get the best out of the developer yeah so he he supported Dave Jaffe to create you know God of War you know Game of the Year he supported the team who housed that game company uh they made Journey who got the Game of the Year and he supported you know you know coming you coming to to Japan and in the end you got the Game of the Year so many many innovations he made possible amazing amazing person i worked so so uh for so long i hope you can listen to this because you probably have a you know a tear but uh yeah alan is very very philosophical um yeah and like
you said like deep uh you know and i think it's not just a product he thinks about it's like he thinks about the people he thinks about the interactions the emotions you know um i could tell that um yeah and so eventually there was an opening for for me, because at the time you were involved in these too.
PlayStation 4 was in the making and our first party were pretty much involved in the hardware development at the time.
So controller, camera and all that.
And so because there was a controller and a camera I was asked, hey do you have some experience with the camera and the cameras?
How about we take the experience and try to do something?
So I was lucky to have a few people joining around me who also could speak good english because my you know japanese was still very uh rough and then we built uh what was called at the time asobi team yeah when exclamation mark yeah and that was going to be an r and that was an r d team inside japan studio which worked as a bridge between the hardware division and the studios where we'd make lots of demos using prototype controllers.
Yeah. So hardware team make the hardware prototype and your team receive the hardware prototype and make the game prototype and share back with the hardware team to discuss.
That's right. And so we would show, you know, all the studios and the idea was to try and think, okay, what would excite them, you know, so that they can really take advantage of that new controller and, and do things even, you know, more creatively or more, you know, you know, surprisingly than, than before.
oh yeah so let me explain so the on ps3 we did ps move that had the light you know ball to be looked at from the usb camera attached to ps3 and moving to ps4 the hardware team you know jointly you know work together with uh you know our you know studio teams decided to to make a new camera that has two cameras to be able to triangulate.
And the DualShock 4 had a light bar that cameras can take a look at so that, you know, the game PS4 can know the distance, and your team are making some examples of how to use that system.
them yeah so in it it it's uh it again an evolution you could say of like the itoy concept and you know with some partially augmented reality you know where you can see yourself you know and the game partially you know completely like you know games but with the controller you know position understood by the game so that you could do things that were kind of a little bit more um yeah innovative and we were trying to find like new things like using the touch pad on the on the controller to flick shurikens oh yeah it was a little ninja game and stuff like that that was like a multiplayer game yeah
yeah yeah yeah four player multiplayer and uh really fun really fun i'm sure today like we can dig it out and that kind of game is still fun so that was pre -installed game for ps4 right yeah so i struck the deal with the hardware team So they founded the development of your game that was pre -installed that every single PS4 player should be able to try that.
That's right. So we didn't think at first that it would end up in front of the consumers.
We thought it's just R &D or on learning.
And then that's all SOB will ever be.
but then when we got to the stage we had lots of these primitive looking demos.
You came and went great guys that looks really nice let's polish them up and put them in a box and we had 5 months to do that ok so time so we looked for an art team really quickly and we worked with them to have this game and the game is called The Playroom and The Playroom the name actually came from Itoy because Itoy used to have like a game you had those mini games but on the side there was this kind of experimental rooms that were a little bit the technology was not quite ready but it was stuff that people you know we wanted to use us to see so we call that the playroom so the playroom was like
a recall of this kind of open space where you can experiment you know and the name stuck because you know or game before astrobot was called astros playroom exactly for that reason right that's for the psv PS5 PS5 Oh, okay So the idea is a pre -installed game or playrooms because they're kind of a little bit more open it doesn't have to be like a gamey game it's more like a way for you to spend time with the hardware and have fun and explore So we made the playroom and all that knowledge that we got around the camera and tracking and the LEDs became really useful for the next big hardware hardware which was psvr
psvr yeah yeah project morpheus so you came along you said guys we're gonna look at vr and i'll be honest with you at first when i heard about vr i was in two minds because one of on the one hand you try a hand you try a headset from any any makers at the time and you try the demo and there was always something amazing and magical you know whatever it was it was amazing being inside the stadium being you know looking at the character yeah that oculus demo like just one room oh yeah in italy it was yeah yeah tuscany tuscany demo was amazing yeah yeah yeah um and but at the same time team asobi
we were trying to be the multiplayer fun uh co -op you know sitting on a sofa accessible to everyone and actually putting a headset on your on your head texas back inside they're more like isolated kind of form so we discussed inside the team and with we we thought it'd be so nice if the screen of the tv could be um could be used as well so we have two screens and we can have both we can have people on the sofa playing a game on the tv and somebody in vr playing together so we hacked you know with a ps vita dev kit like a really we made a hack and you could play five player VR.
Or one player in VR and five player in four player.
One player in headset, other players watching the TV and play like a regular game.
That's right. But that player in headset is inside the game.
That's right. As a game character.
Yeah, and at first this feature was not planned by the hardware division.
What you see on the TV was supposed to be a mirror of the VR only.
All the VR player what they are watching.
But we made so much noise about it.
And because we did a hack, we invited all the execs to come and play a game where we could mix VR and non -VR.
And then when they played, I think it was Imaesan from the system software who went, okay.
And he actually made that feature a default feature for PSVR.
So you could choose to use the headset on its own or you could use to split your resources and display both in VR and on the TV, which, you know, it's hard to do from a development standpoint because you have to split your resources.
But if you plan that from the start, you can do some asynchronous gameplay.
So you are making two games, right?
Yes, one game. Yes, exactly.
So it's hard to do, but it was a good example of how VR can be inclusive.
And the reason I'm mentioning this episode is because, once again, again it's about you know it's hacking you know going against what's been decided sometimes and going you know against what seems like the natural course of things is also a very important part of our jobs we have to be challenging and sometimes we have to be really like you know you might feel like the world is against you yeah and you are the only guy in the room yeah but your instinct thing tells you something yeah like you skip two bosses and send the email to president right yes okay making the playstation right you know i
wasn't there but i read the book apparently it was like really you know instigated sony president yeah you know that's right so i think it's a it's but that's another great story about how collaborative you know hardware team and our game teams were to discuss new features new hardware platform because they had a strong strong desire to make the next PlayStation a really great system for the game developers to make games on.
So they listened to our feedback really well.
Yeah. And the collaboration still exists today, it's really, really fun.
It's very special. So that was the game.
What was the name? The Playroom VR.
Yeah, Playroom VR. VR, so that was, not pre -installed, but everyone who purchased PSVR was able to download.
For free. Yes, exactly.
Yeah. So as we developed the Playroom VR, there was something in the back of our heads where we're doing the prototyping.
It was to try and do classic games in VR, even though it was very counterintuitive.
The whole industry, and I remember sitting at GDC, where there was a talk of black VR specialists purists and they told the whole audience if it's not first person it's not VR you're doing it wrong and but we wanted to do we wanted to try things like classic games you know where you could see your character mmm but in VR and see what we could add and so we had the little test but there's little character you control but the character can also turn around and look back at you and if you remember we were not the first ones to do that because oculus uh rift did that with uh lucky style oh yeah lucky
state yes and in fact uh the two of us uh at e3 you you grab me in the alleys of e3c let's go to the oculus yeah yeah and back then it was very open yeah yeah we were you know exchanging demos each other yeah yeah and i remember we sat down in a room and we played you know several demos and lucky style was was one of them, and I was thinking, this really has, yeah, it proves they're not the only ones thinking about this.
Those guys have a game that is almost going to ship.
So, we continued experimenting, and that's when this idea of Astro, the first Astro game, came through.
So, we decided to put that inside Astro's Playroom VR, because even though it was not a multiplayer game, we thought, if we don't put it in, users will never see it.
it would be a a dead prototype forever and what a shame to not try so we put it in and then what happened is that a lot of the gamers buying uh you know psvr they enjoyed the multiplayer games but what they enjoyed more yeah was that yeah small yeah platformer yeah yeah so that was one of like a five different experiences yeah yeah and the people wanted to make this a full game yeah make this a full game and so it was really nice to hear the confirmation because we felt wow o instinct in fact was correct um so we quickly put the next game into uh and i think we realized it in astrobot rescue mission was made
in 18 months yeah so the psb launched in october 2016 yeah and the rescue mission came out in christmas today yeah a little bit before actually he came mine uh end of august 2018 or yeah i mean oh yeah full full 2018 yeah yeah so um we we we quickly went through that and it was amazing project because we made it without any expectations all we wanted was to to to come to to do the best possible evolution of that prototype and help vr show people okay vr is can do this this this and that and so we were trying to come up with many many original ideas and we had no idea that he was actually going
to be you know a profitable game and you know like and take us even like to to some winning some dice award yeah yeah yeah so that was really really nice and um um and after that you know when the ps5 uh again your team was heavily involved in the discussion for the ps5 and the dual sense right yeah so we made some demos once again and show them to the world the same kind of thing um well one demo everybody talks about like scott roddy still talks about the demo of the haptics your team made for the hardware team that the you know there's a virtual cup and there's a water yeah to you know um pour
into and you feel the there's a water in your hand without anything yeah by using the haptics yeah yeah just by having the left and right kind of like you know vibration kind of bouncing around the controller you you can give that illusion and it's really interesting because you know all of that is a lot of it is is illusion it's about the sound and the look and the vibration and if you you remove one of them it doesn't quite work so the brain is a multi -modal yeah yeah you have to fool the brain into this kind of emotion so we we spent some time there and it was really really fun and then the decision really
really came it was a very hard decision do we continue inside vr do we open up astro to to more people and um it was not forced upon us um you know i think um you know back then there's something also that it's interesting to say and i think it's to your your credit is that i think there was always a lot of freedom and democratic style i mean maybe that's from my point of view maybe for you it was you know more difficult but i always felt that you know we had freedom at the studios and if we didn't believe into something you know you know we were not forced to make it well your boss was alan becker
right all he cares about how much passion and ideas the team has and he must have easily supported which yeah it was an easy yeah I remember it was very easy conversation with him he was like yep go if you know do it and so that became the Astro Playroom that was again the free software for the ps5 launch. Yeah for the ps5 launch so that was all third time making a pre -install kind of introduction title and that led to as you know like we did in the VR you know we do small test you know free for everyone we gauge people's reaction and if it goes well then we go off to make a big game so we quickly
looked at the reactions and then when Astro's Playroom came out and people tried the DualSense they had a really good reaction Yeah, the haptics and adaptive trigger.
That was an amazing showcase of these features, not just for the players, but for all the other developers in the industry.
Yeah, that's right.
Because sometimes we think that all that influencing only happens at R &D level behind closed doors.
But in fact, the games that you release also are very important into influencing people.
and you see the results of these maybe two or three years later you know but um and it was with astros playroom we were wondering are we giving too much are we giving not enough because we had so many things we wanted to show the world what you can do with the controller but at the same time being a free game we had to reserve some things for the next game and uh you know that when you became this sort of like producer converses creator you want to give the world everything but at the same time you have to also think about you know you need to eat lunch tomorrow you have to keep but when you have the wall
full of ideas right yeah you know yeah oh let's talk about that maybe how we come up with these ideas right yeah yeah so we do a lot of brainstorming at timo sobi and usually we we we gather five six people for a small session we have a very focused topic for example it could be um okay we're looking for uh enemies and we're looking to use a particular feature like adaptive trigger what could we come up so and these these two concepts enemies versus adaptive trigger and then we come up with this rapid thinking where everybody draws one idea on one post -it yeah and at the end we we show them to
each other then there's a bit of like uh discussion and then we have another round and just by doing that twice so you spend maybe 30 minutes in a room, you generate easily about 100 ideas.
And then we put them on a wall, and then we look at them, and then when we need to prototype something new, we go inside that pool and pick some new things to prototype.
And that's how we go through this rapid iteration of prototypes because trying lots of things is really, really important, and trying things fast is like a massive winner.
Yeah, I remember you invited me to join some of these you know a milestone check or every two weeks or so you gathered everyone from the studios and everyone in report what they did and let people try the you know game you know i have really fun you know playing the game and people are watching me play the game and if this works or not and move on to the next you know two weeks yeah so that was your methodology of yeah yeah in the game yeah yeah the two weeks is really very important especially when you're trying in gameplay mechanics um we you know our gameplay programmers are really the heart
and soul of tms ob because they're not just programmers they're also game designers they really understand what makes something fun and so for two weeks one person would work on one idea so one of these ideas that came out of the brainstorm a particular enemy you know using the adaptive trigger for example that becomes a goal they have for these two weeks and at the end of the two weeks it needs to be playable right but because one single person worked on it they're able to move really fast there is no like um what happened in game development where time is really really lost is when a lot of people
are colliding i think and not too sure what they're making together but just debate yeah yeah yeah and do and then do but when you leave one person to be in charge if that person has a clear vision to begin with and of course the talent to do that but i mean that that's you know it's it's uh it's expected right um then at the end of the two weeks you have something you can play sometimes it plays fantastically sometimes it doesn't really play well sometimes it's because the idea was like not good sometimes the implementation but the fact is if you do that over a team of like i think we have about now
10 gameplay programmers every two weeks you can look at 10 individual demos of gameplay if you do that over three months over six months you really really have a massive amount of content and then it's much easier to put it together and polish it yeah yeah so let's talk about the uh astrobot the game you know uh just released in last year you know massive you know great you know reactions so it the game you know i but now you know i'm very proud and uh i i don't remember but spend you know many many hours you know doing it and really fun you know it's a it's a full price almost most -priced game,
big game, it failed.
But made by a relatively small team, right?
How many people worked on that game?
So 65 people worked on the game.
But when you started, you were less than...
Oh yeah, when we started, it was just the back of the VRS, so about 30 people, yeah.
And in order to get that amount of variety, it was really, really important to prototype really, really fast in isolation, yeah you know um so that that first phase you know if if the game took about three and a half years to make and if you roughly cut it the first third is spent on prototyping the second third is spent on you know tidying it up and making it you know you know the production and the last third is on the polishing you know and that's really important that we don't sacrifice the last bit because that's when you need the time to reflect cut adjust and a lot of the final quality
you you know resides in that in there but that very first step is really important to get you know all the ingredients we need to cook that nice dish right yeah okay so the prototyping part I cannot stress how important it is and that's for the kind of games we make you know I think for more narrative games I think there's a different approach but for us it's very modular it's lots of little components almost like lego bricks you know and and you can click them together into whatever shapes you want.
But we have that freedom to be able to undo.
For example, if we have a level that is too big, we can chop it into it, it becomes two levels.
So one problem became a very good thing, right?
So this idea of having a game that is...
Like me once saying, the good idea is to make two things happen, right?
And this modular approach is really useful for that reason.
So the game has like 50 levels?
Well, actually, I think total, if you put everything together, it's over 80 plus all the DLC we did.
So we're probably close to 100 now.
But you're right. And it could have been fine with 50.
And that's the great thing about it.
It's also like to know we didn't get obsessed on the scope too much. The game is 12 to 15 hours to complete.
And in fact, it's probably right and fine.
Oh, yeah. people want to finish games these days yeah and so you didn't when you started making the game you didn't create a design document that this game has 80 levels or no it was more organic it was more like depending how many prototypes we can come up with how many ingredients we can farm early on that indicates how much how far the scope can go and it tells you how much you're gonna have to repeat yourself or how much you can have unique things because if you have a lot of individual components then you can you can afford to be more unique if you have less components you're gonna have to
recycle more right I like to use the analogy of cooking because to me it's really like that early on you gather your ingredients and then in the kitchen you assemble and you know if you take an ingredients like tomatoes for example there are a million ways to eat them right so one ingredients can can can have different kind of ways of being used and it's all about making sure that we use them in a way that doesn't feel like the same taste right and at the end of it you have a lot of variety at a low cost so your rapid prototyping and the iteration really help you know game all level to be very
well polished uh however you know then one of the things people really enjoyed playing the you know astrobot was the all these guest characters right from uh you know all playstation characters and third -party companies' beloved characters.
And I was amazed. I didn't know that with all the 300 bots like an initial game had, half of that were guest characters, right?
And considering all the effort it must have taken to communicate to third -party companies and ask for approvals and show them and get feedback, amazing amount of time your team must have spent to be able to accomplish that so for the size of the team you had it could feel a bit too ambitious when you started how did you manage that yeah you're right so you know again it's about finding ways to do things simply right so very early on when we when we decided to to to do that whatever characters came from the SIE world we had to make it easy so I remember we had a seminar a few years ago and at that point
I actually I had I took the chance I was presenting something about VR and I knew we were gonna or about Astro's Playroom and I knew we're gonna have the need to contact everyone so I asked the question back then guys by the way if in our next game we wanted to use your characters would you make that easy on us and a lot of people internally said yeah because after two or three games there was that trust that we could to reach a quality level that was acceptable to them, however, we needed to have one strong example to really finish to give everyone the confidence.
So, we started with Kratos.
We made a really, really nice Kratos with the fur and everything, and showed that from the previous game, from Astro's Playroom, it was a real level up.
It wasn't just a hat or something like that, but it was the character and the animation were respectful of the core material.
And it had the gameplay, right?
It's like a mini God of War game Yeah, so that one was like even extra special because you had the gameplay too Once we showed that as an example I think everyone is much more relaxed about giving their IPs first, you know, like the quality level is reached, and also it's comforting to know that something as precious as God of War if it's there and it's okay then the rest will be too but it was important for us to not not great partners, and say, we give a lot of love to premium IPs and we give less love to...
Not like that. We said, it doesn't matter the importance of the IP.
We're going to give them the same amount of love because somewhere in the world, someone loves this minor IP just as much. Oh, yeah, in terms of amount of love, that particular character getting from smaller number of people must be the same level.
Yeah, so we have to be careful.
So that was for first party and that covered two thirds.
And then for the other third, you're right.
You know, that goes really wide.
It's about, I think over 30 individual publishers.
So we used the best examples we had, like once again, go to four and we approached them one by one.
And you had other department helping that communication?
So the third party relation department played a massive part into that because those guys are the ones talking to these publishers on a daily basis.
yeah so we had to really like make a really good partnership with them and if we could manage that then we could really amplify or reach so we spent time to really uh uh explain to them the idea and what i have to say is across the board so our third -party relation these are people inside playstation but also all the partners yeah everybody played along in a way that we don't expect if you asked me the question two years ago i would have said out of all the characters we want to use we'll be lucky if we can get 15 20 of them because some of them are just feel like untouchable characters but in fact
we got 95 percent oh wow almost everything there's a few that were difficult to get for you know for and which were of course i'm not saying but you know that usually the good reasons is for example like sometimes they were quite obscure characters but there was a fear that if we use them it might it might start a hype about a revival when it was not the case and that's understandable you know we have to be careful about you know the consequences so but in the end uh it works it worked out and yeah so that was a lot of work but then as you see progress and as you see like a character from for example
you see solid snake arriving and then you see a character from biohazard like a resident evil arrive when these characters come in he make us so happy oh yeah so we want to keep going and you know and uh and actually uh uh this week you know we have new levels of uh releasing so yesterday we just launched well at the time we record it was yesterday a new level that has a hutchie from um nice yeah oh that was leaked somehow right yeah it was it was we was guessed by our guests because they saw the artwork and they yeah you posted an image of the people picked it up there okay yeah so yeah congrats
again for the amazing reception and the still keep adding and but you must have started working on next project what you can talk about okay so one thing uh uh you know on the back of astro bot what we thought is whatever we make in the future we want to surprise people you know i think um uh surprise people so continue um having a game that video when you play it you you feel like you know the unexpected happens and whether it's the astral world or not the astral world is the relevant we need to surprise people that's very important that we don't we don't go into making expected games right that's
one thing and of course the same high quality but the other thing is also like a mindset for our team is to reconnect and very quickly and i think we're there already remember what it's like to be the challengers and to forget about the successes the successes are fantastic and it's great and we should be proud about them but in order to also do our best work we have to think simple yeah and to remember what it's like to be you know remember where we come from yeah yeah yeah keep being humble yeah and being a challenger because people say that you know you are only as good as your last game yeah
that's a great message to your own you know team members as well yeah so um yeah it's been it's been an amazing adventure of like, you know, various countries and various games and, but always the one connection throughout the whole thing was, you know, the love for games, you know, imagining the players and the kind of the joy, especially in the case of Astro Bot, you know, the kids.
The first memories we have playing video games are incredibly important because they're the moment where, you know, for us there's a lot of magic that happens.
and so i think it enters our heart in a way that is much deeper than later in life right right and to be able to make a game that is going to have that role to play into you know new kids today it's not it's a privilege it's a duty but it's just an amazing like an amazing chance and uh so very very thankful for so like you know all the parents who kind of allowed us to get into their lives and trusted us to do that, so all of that has been a really really positive journey and I'm really thankful, Shuhei because actually you played a massive part of that I played a little bit many many steps over
the way you were there and it's your philosophy also that just allowed us to be ourselves.
Wow, thank you, thank you and you know, talking about young audience, well actually Nintendo is launching Switch 2 this year, are you planning to port the Astro Bot to Switch 2.
That would be a great in -game to their audience.
It would definitely match the audience, but that's not something I'm thinking about.
You are not allowed to say.
But I will definitely buy a Switch 2 and play their games.
It's a fun, you know, also like healthy competition and you know, they are the masters in that field to me still and we have a lot to learn from them and I can't wait to see what they've been cooking because it must be really interesting yeah yeah yeah yeah thank you for your time very much and uh you know uh congratulations again and uh i'll be i'll be celebrating your next win tonight tonight today together yeah let's do that yeah thank you very much thank you Thank you for joining us for The Game Maker's Notebook.
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