Described as a spiritual successor to Populous, the game revolves around The Breath, which was summoned by a tribe to help them seek and recover their lost knowledge.

The project was created as a result of his fascination with volcanoes, and his desire to combine the ambivalence and violent characteristics of their nature in a new video game.

The team was further inspired by African and New Guinean tribes, Conway's Game of Life, works of Polish painter Zdzisław Beksiński, and Koyaanisqatsi.

In From Dust, players assume a god-like, first-person perspective from which they manipulate an archipelago environment in an effort to save and enlighten a nomadic tribe and help them to seek their lost knowledge.

Lava cools to form solid rock, vegetation propagates in soil and spreads naturally once a village is built, and moving water quickly erodes the terrain.

[2] Campaigns in From Dust are structured as a sequence of missions, whereby completing certain objectives expedites the tribe's progress and bestows additional powers, such as the capacity to jellify water.

These disasters can be inhibited through creative, physical manipulation of the environment: a tsunami can be jellified, wildfires extinguished, and lava flows diverted.

After discovering and journeying through islands of different characteristics, the tribe, with the help of The Breath, have overcome numerous natural disasters including tsunami and volcanic eruption.

Codenamed Project Dust, it was marketed as a spiritual successor to Populous, a game developed by Peter Molyneux and Bullfrog Productions in 1989.

[14][15][16] Ubisoft's decision to release the game via the internet was taken partly to avoid distribution and manufacturing costs, but also to enable creative options for the team and to allow for future features, such as a world editor, multiplayer, or other enhanced content later in the development cycle.

[17][18] Guillaume Bunier, Ubisoft's producer, acknowledged that "some people would not be able to play it", but argued that the majority of individuals interested in the game would be using PlayStation Network, Xbox Live Arcade, and Steam.

[23][24] Following the completion of Heart of Darkness in 1998, Chahi left the video game industry to explore other interests, and subsequently developed a passion for volcanology.

After the company reversed its decision, the team spent approximately two years meeting with the key people within Ubisoft; development properly began in January 2008.

Chahi, still intending to make another video game "before [he] died", hoped that his next project could convey the: "ambivalence of Nature, beautiful and potentially violent at the same time".

[29] While discussing the game's visual elements and art direction, developers revealed that they used several locations on Earth, such as the Yemeni islands of Socotra, lagoon archipelagos of Polynesia, and central Sahara as sources of inspiration.

[30] Bruno Gentile, Art Director of From Dust, stated that the world possessed strong visual contrasts, with "rich and swarming life full of weird shapes and colors".

However, the team later shifted the format to a god game hoping players would interact with the environment and simulation, and not treat those elements as a background.

[15] Chahi emphasised the difficulty of balancing this technical simulation with individual enjoyment, commenting that sometimes: "it would take days to find the right value for gameplay that's also aesthetically pleasing".

[15] According to Chahi, simulation is the most challenging part of the game, as it requires developers to put much effort into optimisation because of its high computation demands.

[33] Regarding physics in the world of Dust, Chahi commented that the developers had: "worked hard to translate a vision of the power of the Earth moving and exploding in the game".

[35] Chahi stated that the developers abandoned the traditional head-up display (HUD), and instead chose an abstract form, the Breath, which they then "fully integrated in the storyline".

[31] The game originally featured a biological life cycle system for the villagers, where players could witness their births, growth, and their eventual death.

He believed that the team had done a tremendous job expressing the relationship between humans and nature with the simulation features included in the final game.

[33] In August and September 2010, Montpellier designers indicated that a variety of expansions were under consideration, including a weather simulation, world editor, and multiplayer capacity.

[15] In September 2010, Chahi stated that From Dust was a "solo experience", although if the game's sales were promising, he indicated that the team would consider introducing an editor or a multiplayer mode.

Its controls were praised for being simple, intuitive, accessible,[42] and smooth, though some critics noted that the cursor sometimes suffers from fidgeting and lacks precision.

[41][43][49] However, Ryan Winterhalter from 1UP.com criticized the game for its lack of a free sandbox mode, and James Stephanie Sterling from Destructoid called the manipulation mechanic "boring".

[47][49] Eurogamer's Oli Welsh echoed this comment as he further described the game's visuals as "strange" and "organic", comparing it to the work of French cartoonist Jean Giraud.

[42] Criticisms were generally directed at the game's artificial intelligence, where the tribespeople have trouble pathfinding and are often stuck in places, leading to players' frustration.

[48][52] There were also a large number of reports that the PC version had crashing issues, glitches, and a small bracket of supported graphics cards, rendering the game unplayable for some.