Atonal Dreams is a story-driven RPG set in a lore-rich world, with a novel musical battle system where you can tame your opponents to join your side as allies, and later summon them to use as levellable skills.

Centuries ago, the gods who dreamed Alora Fane into being were slaughtered by a blasphemer among their children, a beast known as Blight the Betrayer, casting the world into a nightmare.|A faction of devout knights called the Seraphim emerged to maintain ordered civilisation in the gods' absence, while those who saw the gods' death as freedom from tyranny founded the Blight Wolves to live lives of defiant chaos in the wild.

This story follows Savitr, a cerebral, celebrated Seraph whose unusual demonic appearance belies his compassionate heart, as he sets out on a mission together with his rough, tough new apprentice, Collie, who is eager to escape and atone for her youth spent hurting as one of the Blight Wolves.

In a search to find Savitr's missing friend, they travel to a monastery of monks who ponder the drealm - the sea of unformed consciousness in which the material world floats - where they will encounter a cast of quirky eccentrics and a menagerie of mentally-manifested monsters, and walk awake through their darkest nightmares...

...to see light brought to the wounded world once more.

The game takes place across several dungeon-like areas filled with classic JRPG staples such as loot, story scenes, and turn-based battles.|Each area is made up of a grid of rooms which you explore from a top-down perspective with a fixed camera reminiscent of retro games such as the early entries in the Final Fantasy or Zelda series. There are a limited number of battles which can be permanently cleared to achieve satisying 100% completion. No need to grind!

The relatively fewer, more deliberate battles stress strategy, with a big focus on manipulating states to build huge effectiveness multipliers.|Figmon - Alora Fane's monsters, 'solid hallucinations' born of negative thoughts - can be either defeated or tamed over to your party as controllable allies for the remainder of the battle. Characters' skills take the form of previously tamed figmon, which are briefly summoned via musical instruments to deliver elemental attacks.

Skills gain XP equal to the damage they inflict, permanently increasing their character's stats with each level up. Mastered skills provide no further growth, though, so characters must train many different skills if they want to reach their full potential!

Elements play a heavy focus. There are six of them, representing facets of consciousness rather than the classical elements of material nature.|Skills and characters have elements, with characters' three elements representing their personality, meaning who they are mentally directly affects their performance during gameplay.

The project started life as a 'reimagining' of MARDEK - a Flash RPG series I made in the late 2000's - though it's evolved a lot since then. Originally I planned a loose retelling of - and conclusion to - the MARDEK events, but - fearing getting locked into a years-long project - I planned Atonal Dreams as a shorter, standalone prequel showing the exploits of the character inspired by MARDEK's father, Enki.

I thought I could finish in six months... but I kept revising my ideas about the gameplay and lore details. I'm about 3 years in as of November 2022, and the successive iterations have, in my opinion, produced something so much better than what I had when I started. But I'm still far from completion.|I'll need to look into promoting and marketing to gain funding before continuing... but that's absolutely not my forte, so I find it very daunting!