Interviews// From Dust - Eric Chahi

From Dust is a god game with a rather unique twist - you’re not given an open-ended world and encouraged to do whatever you fancy, but rather must complete mission-based objectives so that a tribe can repopulate its race. You do this by taking control of the world’s elements and creating new landscapes for your merry men to travel across.

I managed to speak to the game’s creator, Eric Chahi (also creator of Another World, fact fans) about the challenges in design, his thoughts on digital distribution and how the was not intentionally a god game from the start.

SPOnG: It’s interesting to see a god sim game on a console, as traditionally they have not worked out too well on home platforms. What were the challenges and your inspirations behind From Dust?

Eric Chahi: I worked on the game’s design back in 2004, but it really transformed into the concept for From Dust in about 2006. I asked Ubisoft if it would be interested in helping me create this game and they were very excited about it. However, work on the game didn’t actually start until 2008. Originally, the main idea was to create a game about the erosion of the earth - erosion of life and all that it entails - and the knowledge and power to interact with nature to prevent it.

That concept evolved during the game’s creation to finally become a god game. It wasn’t a god game at the start, but we decided to change this because we wanted to make this concept into something fun to play, by creating a passage of time where the world is constantly evolving.


SPOnG: As an independent designer, how difficult is it to think of new ideas and find a publisher who is willing to take a risk on it?

Eric Chahi: Ubisoft was really receptive. It took a long time for it to decide on supporting the project, but once it was on board it was fantastic. I have been working with a small team assigned by Ubisoft to create the game. One challenge I found is that working with a team internally is not always easy, because you have to make other people understand where you want to go and what the key objective is, otherwise you end up with a completely different product.

The key thing was to make the team understand the universe and to make sure that the concept was a part of their feelings too. This allowed them to become really interested and involved, and new ideas came from the team because of that. Sometimes I had to adapt my original vision so that we could accommodate the ideas of the team too. It’s really important to have a creative pool, in the end it makes for some really interesting things.

For example, the tribesmen all wear masks. I was not originally thinking of masks - more along the lines of body painting and expression, but we had more of a response about using masks from the team so we did that instead. It really adds a strong identity for the game - indeed, seeing a real face is nice but the gap between a badly rendered and well rendered expression is huge. Like the Uncanny Valley, just changing one little thing can destroy the face or the emotion you’re trying to convey.

Ultimately, we’re a small team so we had to ask ourselves; could we really be able to create nice faces? We thought ‘no’ so we thought it better to have a mask.