Dasota Universe is a one-developer studio, and the world its founder has been drawing for more than ten years: a planet called Dania, its purple forests, and the colony ship that crossed seventy-six years of space to reach it.
The games
The Dania trilogy tells that world's story in three games. Dania — First Encounter, the landing, is the one being made now; it comes to Steam Early Access in 2027, one Act at a time. Expedition and Elemental Discord are planned.
Every week
The Ship's Log is a development update every Friday. The comic is a strip every Monday, set aboard the ship in the years before the game begins. Ways to follow both.
AI Use Disclaimer
Dania — First Encounter is made by one developer working with an AI assistant. How AI is used in games is a fair thing to ask, so here is exactly who does what, what is never used, and how the work is checked.
What the developer does
- Created the world. The planet Dania, its history, the ship and the people aboard come from more than ten years of the developer's own writing and concept art.
- Directs the project. Decides what gets made, in what order, and when it is good enough to keep.
- Designs the game. Its mechanics and systems, its areas and levels, the route through the ship, the story and its characters. Whatever the assistant proposes, the developer accepts, changes or turns down.
- Directs the art. The look follows the developer's concept art, and a piece goes back as many times as it takes.
- Directs the sound. Chose its style, the synthesizers of the 1980s and early 1990s, and had the score planned by mood and by place before a note of it was written. Listens to every piece of music and every sound effect, and keeps it, sends it back or cuts it.
- Reviews and approves everything. Plays each milestone against a written checklist, reads every line of dialogue, and marks every picture and every sound keep, change or cut. Nothing is kept until the developer has seen it working and approved it.
- Runs production. The plan, the milestones, the playtests and the releases.
That is hours of work, every day.
What the AI assistant does
The assistant is Claude, made by Anthropic. Working to the developer's direction, it:
- writes the game's code and its tests;
- drafts dialogue and other in-game text from the developer's story, for review line by line;
- writes the programs that build the game's 3D models and render them as pixel art, following the developer's concept art and notes;
- writes the game's music and sound effects: each piece of music as notes and each sound as a small program, played by a synthesizer written for this game. The assistant can't hear what it writes; it measures it, and the developer's ear decides;
- drafts the Ship's Log, the comic's scripts and this site's pages, which the developer reviews before anything is posted.
What is never used
- No image generators. No picture in the game, in the comic or on this site came from an image-generation model. The art is rendered from 3D models and drawing programs written for this game.
- No audio generators and no AI voices. The music and the sound effects are written by the assistant, as described above: nothing in the game was produced by a model that generates sound, and nothing was sampled from anyone's recording. The game has no voices.
- Nothing generated while you play. The game contains no AI model and sends nothing to one.
Other people's work
No outside works are in the game: its pictures, its music and its sounds are all made for it. The engine and the tools are used under their own licences. The demo released in October 2026 used music by Juhani Junkala, Cleyton Kauffman and Guy G. Gamerson and sound effects by Kenney, all released into the public domain (CC0) by the people who made them; they are credited in it by name. The world, the story and the characters are Dasota Universe's own.
How it is checked
As of October 2026, a full playthrough of the game is more than 600 written checks, more than 300 lines of dialogue have been read and approved one at a time, and every piece of music and every sound effect has been listened to and kept, sent back or cut. Every new area, creature and screen goes through the same review before it is kept.
Where it is disclosed
On the game's Steam page when it opens, under every Ship's Log and every comic strip, and here. If you want to know how something was made, ask.
Contact
Write to press@dasotauniverse.com.