With Fumito Ueda and Hideo Kojima citing his work as an influence, Eric Chahi has an enviable pedigree. He is best known for the 1991 Amiga platformer Another World, a game which featured no HUD and very little dialogue, instead framing its story with cutscenes, rotoscoped character animation and pacing more evocative of cinema than games up until that point. After the exhausting six year development process of his following project (1998 PlayStation release Heart Of Darkness), however, he decided to take a break from making games. In 2005, after being inspired by a trip to a volcano, the idea for Project Dust (working title) formed, and a year later a pitch to Ubisoft gave the project a publisher.
"All of this came from my experience during a trip to an active volcano," explains Chahi, who began his career at French game developer Loriciels in 1983. "I felt very intense feelings because it was at the same time incredibly beautiful, but so powerful and dangerous. And yet a volcano is a source of life."
Eric Chahi
Coming from a man who built his career on games with linear narratives, Project Dust's non-linear, sandbox play and reliance on the player to create their own stories is perhaps surprising. On first glance the game's presentation - an elevated viewpoint, looking down on a landscape inhabited by humans who require your help - suggests a god game. Indeed, Chahi has described it as the spiritual successor to Populous.
But players will find no politics or resource management here, and he is at pains to communicate its focus. "It's not like a strategy game where you can say to each unit, do this, do that - it's not micromanagement," he stresses. "You influence them more indirectly. It's a kind of god game, but one where nature plays an important part - you have abilities but they're not unlimited. You're not an individual from the tribe, but the tribe as a whole. You're not a god. If they disappear, you disappear."
To stop this happening, you must use your limited powers to move matter, such as earth, water or lava, around the world. On console this is achieved by squeezing the left trigger to pick it up, forming a tightly packed ball that floats in the air, and dropping it with the right. While this may seem initially restrictive, Chahi assures us this isn't the case.
"Because you can take water, ground, or plants, and all of these react together, you have really deep gameplay with this simple action. As an example, you can easily create a dam to change the course of a river, which could save a village from flooding, but it might just go to another village. Or perhaps you could redirect the river to extinguish a fire, or create new land by cooling lava. All this is calculated, of course, but it's not fully predictable - it's interesting because there is uncertainty which brings change that the player must manage. The more time you spend in the game, the better you understand the world and how you are able to influence it."
The team is very proud of the simulation, based on real-world geological behaviour, which provides the backdrop to emergent play. Rivers carve valleys in five minutes rather than 500 years; volcanoes form, drastically changing the landscape; and an indigenous eco-system of plants and animals ebb and flow according to your actions. "The real world is full of extraordinary things like volcanoes, tsunamis and earthquakes - these are all ordinary things in the world of Dust," Chahi explains. "For instance, lava creates volcanoes in a realistic way, and it's the first time that there has been simulated lava flow in games. I'm very proud of this. You have to survive in this very dynamic landscape that's always in motion."
The lifespan of a tribe member, from active youth to old age, is about seven minutes. In a game measured in generations, we wonder how objectives are defined; Chahi begins to explain but producer Guillaume Brunier cuts in.
"At the beginning of the game, your tribe have lost their memory, they've lost their powers. And they live in this world that's very, very aggressive to them," he explains. "If you don't do anything, they're going to be wiped out, so players have to help them. Besides that there are no other objectives. Your shamen might tell you that there's going to be a tsunami coming in a few minutes but we don't have a pop-up screen that sets objectives, you just know that some events are coming. You can expand your tribes and villages, and the more villages you have, the more chance you have for people to stay alive in this world.
"Because everything you see in the world is simulated, what I do here will create a challenge for me there maybe later on, maybe now. That's really, really cool - we have the butterfly effect in the game. If I put ground on the source of a river so that it no longer flows, then the vegetation on the shore is not going to be watered anymore, and then the animals that are here will die."