Hi everybody, we hope you are all doing well and keeping healthy. This is Jamie, the Animation Director over at Team Asobi. First things first, a big thank you for your feedback, comments and reviews of Astro's Playroom (fact: we do read them all!). We are genuinely delighted to see so much love and positivity around the game. You guys are great!
Looking at your comments, one thing that stood out in particular were the various PlayStation game tributes and cameos hidden all over Astro's Playroom. Being huge fans of the PlayStation heritage ourselves, we had a real blast creating these! And as you can imagine, with so many amazing and cherished game characters to pick from, we felt a big responsibility to deliver the fun and quality that would do justice to them.
Today, let us give you a short insight into the creation process of these fun cameos!
As often is the case, we started with concepting these ideas on paper. Toshihiko Nakai, our concept artist oozes creativity and his ideas just jump off the page. Looking through the PlayStation games history, he started drawing lots of fun bot cameos based on PlayStation characters from the last 25 years.
The selection process was simple, if a given cameo was instantly recognisable, made us smile, laugh, and got our inner geek excited, then it would make it through the first step.
Choosing iconic items of clothing or tools from the given game was paramount to getting that instant recognition while still leaving a little bit of guessing work to do for the player. It had to be a fun game of deciphering, even for players who knew where these cameos originated from. For this to work, a precise knowledge of each of the games was necessary. Once again, Toshihiko proved to be an incredible gaming encyclopedia!
Another important aspect of making a good cameo was the comedy aspect: each of these scenes had to be funny to watch and not shy away from making a bit of fun of the original games while, of course, still paying respect: that was a balancing act and one of the more difficult things to get just right.
Here are a few examples of early cameo sketches from Toshihiko.
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/51407374324_5c81edd3f9_h.jpg
Of course, we involved all original makers of those games from the beginning to the end, which was a real privilege for us. Along the way, we got to make new friends, learn about the making of some of the most amazing PlayStation game series, and, errr… maybe even got a few of our own old games signed. You know, for posterity. :)
Considering that each and every creator we asked agreed to lend their amazing characters to the cause goes to show there is a real fraternity and comradery between creators but also a definite common love for PlayStation between us all. This is true for our PlayStation Studios friends, of course, but also for our many other partners who created the most iconic games on PlayStation during the last 25 years. We can never thank these teams enough for their kindness and trust.
Astro’s Playroom: the story behind those fun PlayStation character cameos
How Team Asobi captured over 25 years of PlayStation magic in its PS5 launch title.
blog.playstation.com
