Team ASOBI's creative and studio director Nicolas Doucet shared that the studio's next project will be a full-blown commercial title and spoke about the team's approach to creating games.
In a recent interview with GamesIndustry.biz, the creative and studio director at Team ASOBI, the developer behind Astro Bot: Rescue Mission for PlayStation VR and Astro's Playroom for PlayStation 5, Nicolas Doucet spoke about the studio's plans for the next game, the proximity to PlayStation's hardware team, and the team's approach to creating games.
The latest project developed by the studio was Astro's Playroom, the PlayStation 5 pack-in title that was meant to be more of a DualSense showcase game but turned out to be a quite successful game of its own – it was well-received by players and also critically acclaimed. Team ASOBI's next title, according to Doucet, is going to follow in the footsteps of Astro's Playroom as well as other games developed by the studio, but this time the developer plans to make it a full-blown commercial title, and the team's "biggest to date."
The new game will likely utilize the PS5 DualSense controller with its haptic feedback and adaptive triggers to its fullest extent. Doucet described the DualSense as the studio's "special weapon" saying that the team continues to play around with the controller.
"Any new technology, we like to take it for a spin," he said. "There's the obvious way to use it, which is the first thing we are going to try, and then we are going to try to use it in ways you're not supposed to. That leads us to interesting places."
Doucet said that Team ASOBI's proximity to PlayStation's hardware team in Japan is one of its greatest assets and the team uses it to make the most out of it. Doucet shared that the studio is "one of the first people to get [its] hands onto prototypes". When the team got DualSense for the first time "it didn't look anything" like it does now, according to the studio director, but it already had its main features including adaptive triggers and haptic feedback, so the studio started experimenting with them already at this early stage.
According to Doucet, Team ASOBI uses a hybrid working model with some team members working from the office and some working from home but still, every member of the staff gathers together offline every two weeks to showcase what they've been working on. According to the director, this way of work allows the company to test new features and innovations and quickly do any iterations needed.
"When you're trying to do innovation, you need to find out very quickly if you're on the right track. If you spend six months and then you realise that it was the wrong approach, it can be very costly," Doucet said. "So this quick iteration approach, it works really well for anything that requires heavy prototyping. Because of the field we are in, we tend to make games that have lots of small innovations. We need to test those rapidly."
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