Astro’s Playroom is effectively a welcome mat for all new PS5 owners. That’s an awful lot of pressure…

It’s pressure, but it’s a massive privilege, you know? And if we weigh the two, I would say that the privilege outweighs the pressure. Although like any game, throughout the whole production you’re full of doubts: how are people gonna react to this, to that. There’s a lot of things we have to consider, because there are so many aspects to the game – what experience do we decide to have with the DualSense, how far do we go with the heritage of PlayStation? But it’s also stuff like difficulty, for example. It’s not like you want to put up walls. As much as possible, we want everybody to try all of these instances of DualSense gameplay. So even though we’re building a classic game, we can’t make it too hard. And because it’s a pre-installed game, this kind of day-one experience is going to have a different meaning over time: one, two, three, four years into the future, when people purchase a PlayStation 5 for the first time, it will be that day-one experience but for a different audience. So we also have to consider that. It’s actually a fascinating process to go through.

“AND SO WE TAKE THOSE PROTOTYPES, WE REALLY TRY TO EXTRACT THE GAME EXPERIENCE OUT OF THEM, WE FEED THAT BACK INTO THE LOOP”

When did you get started? Can you tell us about the process of developing ideas for the DualSense before it existed in its finished form?

We were in the final phase of making Astro Bot: Rescue Mission for PSVR, around the summer of 2018. At that point, we had already got our hands on prototypes of the DualSense. So early 2018 we started prototyping quite heavily, with just a couple of people on the side, but trying lots of things. And the process is that we work closely with the mechanical engineering team in Japan. And so they give us these prototypes to have the technology, but not necessarily any use cases. They have a good hunch, in fact, for what might be good in games, but they’re electronics engineers, not game programmers. And so we take those prototypes, we really try to extract the game experience out of them, we feed that back into the loop, and that helps them actually make the next decision on how to improve those features. So we have this cycle. And so, around that time in early 2018, we had about 80 tech demos. And these tech demos could be really simple. One was like a firstperson shooting range – so you’d have a pistol, machine gun, shotgun, bow and arrow to test the adaptive trigger. A weather demo just cycled through wind, rain, hail, sandstorm. You feel Astro’s steps throughout the whole Playroom experience, but at the beginning, it was just a 2D demo with a character walking through strips of different surfaces. The easiest thing would have been to make a collection of minigames. That’s usually the straightforward thing, because everything is so disconnected. And we weren’t asked or ordered to do this, but that’s when we said, ‘Okay, let’s use Astro like a magnet for all of these tech demos and try to make something cohesive out of it – like a short platformer, where the journey through the levels could be a string of experiences.’ I’m not sure if to the user’s eyes it’s invisible, or if they feel like it’s stitched together – you know, tech demo A, B, C, D, E. But that’s the approach we took to build it. And, as much as possible, to iron over the top to make it feel smooth and continuous.