Interviews// From Dust - Eric Chahi

SPOnG: You mentioned that From Dust was not originally a God game. When that decision was made, did your team have any difficulty in trying to present a god sim on a console?

Eric Chahi: The control was not a difficulty - that was something that we thought about from the beginning. The trouble we had came more so with the interaction. With a mouse you can just select a unit, do this, do that, change from one to another really fast. You can’t easily replicate that on a controller.

We had a system where you could call individuals to several separate positions, in an attempt to bring that micro-management element to the game. But in the end it was really frustrating and not that intuitive. At the time we had this really cool sandbox editor that we were using exclusively for creating the landscape. That was fun, but the actual gameplay that the player had was not. So we decided to bring the interaction of the editor to allow players to interact directly with the terrain. It quickly becomes a god game then. That process happened just over a year ago.


SPOnG: I was told earlier that the sandbox level creator that’s in the game allows you to shape the world as you like. And it saves the level as you left it so that you can come back to it later in the same state...

Eric Chahi: Yes, when you leave a level it keeps what you have changed or created. After you beat the challenge there’s nothing you can really do in the level because there’s no events to accomplish, but there is a real pleasure in changing the landscape freely. The player starts to make it their own landscape and make their own challenge.


SPOnG: Will there be a way for players to share what they’ve created with other players? Is that something you might look into?

Eric Chahi: No. We focused really on the core experience, and because we are a small team we had to make a choice as to what sort of features we could afford to implement.


SPOnG: God games are known for their open-ended, objective-less gameplay. But From Dust is split into chapters, with a mission-based structure. Is the ability for players to save their levels and play around with them your way of implementing a more open-ended premise to the game?

Eric Chahi: These objectives can be solved in a different way, in a different order, the main objective is to populate each totem. Yes, and it is an important point. I really wanted to bring a good challenge into a god game with this. I love the genre, but sometimes I think it’s too open and players get lost in the vastness. I wanted to streamline the gameplay for a true challenge

Once you finish that challenge you can continue to play with it, maybe in a more classic god game way. But the nice thing is that because there’s a mission-based structure during your first play-through, everything that the player does has a lot more meaning because they need to solve dramatic situations.


SPOnG: Would you work with Ubisoft again in the future on another project?

Eric Chahi: Well maybe. I hope so. It depends on each other’s feelings towards any future projects, really. If we can both bring something interesting and if we are both enthusiastic about it, then I’d love to work with Ubisoft again.


SPOnG: Thank you very much for your time.

Eric Chahi: Thank you very much.