Two of the 12 friends you can rescue in the game are Chris and Dan of HyperDuck SoundWorks, an electronic music duo specializing in composing video game soundtracks and the composers of the soundtrack to Dust: An Elysian Tail. Once unlocked, they will appear on the stage within the Sanctuary behind a turntable performing the song "Glick 16" alongside the addition of multi-colored lights.

After this user emailed HyperDuck SoundWorks sometime in 2020 about their origin and involvement in the game, Chris responded with:

While the game was in early stages of development, Alex Kain saw early footage of the game and decided to contact its creator Dean Dodrill directly to offer assistance in game's writing. Dean was reluctant at first and gave a small sample of the game's story to which Alex gave feedback on where it could be improved; sometime later Dean took Alex on as an assistant writer for the game.

The letters you collect can sometimes give hints on how to rescue other characters; one such hint is a letter titled "The Girl" which says the following:


While not signed, if you do go to the bridge in Denham and make your way up, you can rescue Bandage Girl from the Super Meat Boy series, implying that the letter was written by Dr. Fetus and sent to Meat Boy, who is known for wall jumping in his series.

After collecting all of the Resonance Gems, it's possible to unlock Bastion, with the player having to walk on paths that appear in front of them in the air. This is a reference to the game Bastion itself, as the world builds itself with platforms.

When making Dust's Sprite sheets, Dean Dodrill drew all of dust's frames by hand, however he didn't draw Dust with the Blade of Ahra, that was a CG Model which was layered on top of Dust's movements

The PC port of the game was re-worked for PC as Dean Dodrill said on his Twitter, in reply to a tweet from Total Biscuit, saying: "I'm primarily a PC Gamer, so I created the Port that I would be happy with as a PC Gamer."
Other things were changed or added in, such as re-recorded dialogue to note keys as "Attack Buttons" rather than "X" or "Y", along with HUD layout options and various other options that weren't available in the original Xbox Live version.

During development of Dust, Dean Dodrill submitted early Demo Footage during a convention which caught Microsoft's attention, being impressed with what they saw, they offered a chance to have his game published on the Xbox 360 as an Indie Game. the offer accepted, and had a planned release, but then it changed when Microsoft contacted him stating that he needed it to be finished near around June of that year, or it wouldn't get published onto the Summer of Arcade.
This increased the workload as he was mainly working alone, and also increased time pressure for the voice actors as multiple actors were called in at the same time to reduce the recording time by half to have it all ready.
The extra workload paid off as the game was finished on time, and even got popular enough to be ported to Steam, PS4 and iOS in order with a year apart from each other.

At the start of making Dust, Dean Dodrill had little to no experience with Coding, being more of an animator, this became apparent when after coding in all of the Voices and character portraits, a bug was causing the game to show nothing but a black screen during cutscenes. In an interview, Mr Dodrill said: "I broke down crying, it felt like losing a loved one."
However, he also says that on the last day to submit the game, he woke up "seemingly having reprogrammed the entire dialogue system in my dreams, as well as a new way to load all content."

The creator of Dust, Dean Dodrill, originally intended to make an animated film simply titled: "An Elysian Tail". At a booth during PAX 2013, he stated: "I originally wanted to make it a film, but then I thought "Let's make something easier, like a video game!""

In order to rescue Braid in Blackmoor Mountains, you must obtain the Red Orb and crouch down. After this, a tornado will move you to a different location. This is a reference to Simon's Quest, in which you need to do the exact same thing in order to continue the game.