Q & A: NICOLAS DOUC ET
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.
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.
With 80 prototypes to choose from, how did you work out not only which ones to use, but how to fit them together? Obviously you need to showcase the DualSense’s features, but beyond that how did you refine those concepts?
Each demo tries to really focus on one of the features, sometimes combining a couple. But there’s always like a primary thing we’re trying to prove. It could be that the feature
“AND SO WE TAKE THOSE PROTOTYPES, WE REALLY TRY TO EXTRACT THE GAME EXPERIENCE OUT OF THEM, WE FEED THAT BACK INTO THE LOOP”
looks like it’s going to work on paper, but we need to find out to be sure. Usually there’s a secondary target, too – for the climbing game, the primary target was the adaptive trigger, creating a sense that you can cling on to a rock, and you can feel whether it’s in your hand, or whether you’re about to grab it. Whereas the motion sensing in this demo was secondary – you could easily do a demo without it, but we added it on top to make it better. So naturally, when we got to the point where we had Astro as the centre of that experience, we mapped it out on a big board which we separated into four areas. So it’s like, ‘Here’s the space area, okay, what can we fit here? We can fit the jetpack, the gun, the minigun…’ and we started separating and distributing them.
Was there anything that didn’t make the cut for whatever reason?
Yeah, we had to cut some stuff that just didn’t fit naturally. We had a really great chainsaw demo where you would rev the chainsaw and just cut through stuff coming at you – you’d cut through ice, through metal. And that felt really good, the adaptive trigger and the haptics were working really well together. But that was one where we tried and tried to find a way to fit it, but it just felt like it just didn’t fit for this type of game. But if somebody wants to make a horror game, you know, that’s a good one. That works [laughs].
The fidelity of the haptic feedback is remarkable. Obviously you were working on prototype controllers a lot of the time, but were there any ‘wow’ moments for you, in terms of realising what you could do with DualSense?
Actually, yeah – especially the adaptive trigger, which was like a no-brainer. Even just with sample software, without any actual game application, you could tell. You could just imagine a trigger clicking and releasing, and immediately you’re like ‘Okay, this is going to work for a gun.’ And then once we tried it, it very quickly convinced everybody. Some other demos were more about getting a feeling that you’re onto something – like when we were working with a very early version of the controller where it needed a little bit more intensity, or a little bit more stiffness or this or that to actually fulfil the potential. But we made a demo package for internal use – it was funny because even the demo package opened up with a zipper, so you’d unzip the title screen and then you’d have the menu with the different demos. And these ones would be shown around to the other studios. So we had several seminars, and we’d have people from Naughty Dog, Santa Monica, Guerilla Games… everybody playing those demos.
There were some demos that were always clear winners. Like the shooting range – it’s not so much of a jump of imagination to put that inside another game. The weather and the tech demos, too, because it’s environmentals, so you can easily see how they would fit into any open world with different terrain. Those demos ended up being in our own game, but to be entirely honest, when we first decided on the ones to try, we were imagining the classic utilisation in games. For example, the climbing demo actually came from thinking, ‘Okay, Uncharted is all about climbing, there are many games that have this kind of mechanic these days, so that would be a good one to prove.’ But yeah, the real eureka moments came from some of the more obvious use cases.
What was the biggest surprise for you in terms of the console itself? What did you manage to achieve with the hardware that you didn’t necessarily anticipate when you started development?
For us, the controller was the main thing we were focused on, but… well, I mean, I wouldn’t say Astro’s Playroom is the demo for graphical fidelity, I think you’d look more at Spider-Man or Demon’s Souls for that…
It does look pretty good!
Thank you, that’s really nice [laughs bashfully]. I guess it was when we created the PlayStation Artifacts. We started with the original PlayStation console, because we had to convince people inside the company – to
“WE HAD TO CUT SOME STUFF THAT JUST DIDN’T FIT NATURALLY. WE HAD A REALLY GREAT CHAINSAW DEMO WHERE YOU WOULD REV THE CHAINSAW”