ATONAL DREAMS

Atonal Dreams is an immersive indie turn-based RPG that blends surface silliness with a deeper exploration of the nature of reality, the afterlife, and coping with mental trauma, in which an angelic alien-devil knight travels with his spunky dog-girl apprentice/fangirl to a monastery full of monks who ponder what lies beyond life's end.

Set in a world where emotions manifest as monsters and magic, the game explores our conflicted hero's painful guilt and hopeful devotion as the realm of dreams confronts him with the demons of his past.

The game is highly inspired by the traditional JRPGs of old, such as the early Final Fantasies. You roam around a 'field', talking with NPCs and collecting items, and romp through dungeons filled with non-random monster encounters.

Quality Over Quantity

When I was younger, I loved vast 50+-hour world-saving epic RPGs, but now that I'm older I haven't the time or interest to either play or make those. The intention with this is to make a full but 'bite-sized' RPG, with a deep, fulfilling plot that isn't bloated with repetitive, pointless padding. It should take a handful of hours to complete.

Turn-based Combat

Battles pit your party of up to four against teams of monsters. You can take your time with each character's turn to determine the best strategy.

Characters have elements based on aspects of the mental world rather than the physical one: Courage, Fear, Bliss, Destruction, Creation, Sorrow. They also have personality runes (the Rtj or AfG things in the screenshot) which represent their nature as presented in the story as well as their combat properties. Both of these are used to determine both the offensive and defensive effectiveness of skills, and runes in particular can be manipulated to effectively change combatants' resistances and strengths.

Light and Dark

Characters have a standard HP value, as well as a 'Mind' stat which is balanced between Light and Dark. You can kill monsters by depleting their HP, or if you convert their mind to fully light, they're tamed over as controllable allies for the duration of the battle. Similarly, allies become Lost if their darkness fills, and switch over to the enemy side until tamed back or knocked out.

Several situations play out differently depending on whether you kill or tame your opponents, and this allows for pacifist runs.

Skill Development

Each character has an arsenal of unique skills which they acquire through plot progression. They gain experience equal to the points of damage they inflict, and as such level up and become more potent quickly from repeated skillful use. Higher level skills increase in power and have additional effects.

Reactions System

Most attacks have a simple 'reaction' component, where you can press a button with the right timing to trigger bonus effects. Magic takes the form of music, for which you trigger the reaction effect by tapping in time with short, simple rhythms unique to each spell.

Potions

In addition to skills, characters can combine pairs of reagents on the fly to produce a variety of potions with various damaging, restorative, or de/buffing effects.

The story follows four characters with comical quirks and hidden depths. Much emphasis is placed on exploring character psychology, emotions, and connections, and establishing an immersive world you can really get lost in (immersion in a game's world is the aspect I most enjoy personally).

This game began its life as a reimagining of MARDEK (a popular game I made years ago), and each of these characters are (very loosely!) inspired by characters from that.

Savitr

Savitr is a hybrid of the Bold and Lucen races (Bold are essentially humans, Lucen are kind of like 'alien devils'), who fights for light despite his fiendish appearance. He's widely-renowned as the paragon of the Seraphim - an order of angelic protectors who are sent all over the world to help whoever needs helping - though under the shiny surface, he's privately consumed by profound guilt about past 'sins' which he committed when he 'wasn't in his right mind'.

In battle, he uses a pair of 'resonars' - the Seraphim's signature crystal swords, which produce musical tones when rubbed together - to unleash a wide variety of impressive attacks and musical magic.

He's loosely inspired by MARDEK's Enki.

Collie

A fresh new member of the Cherubim - the name for Seraphim-in-training - who's got more than a bit of a crush on Savitr, Collie is eager and excited to help the needy. She acts like a dog. It's silly. There's more to her than that, though!

She's still learning how to use her resonar, but she enjoys rubbing it against the crystal in her shield to tame opponent monsters.

She's not based on a MARDEK character, but... it's too complicated to describe here!

Ossoum

A weird bald man who rambles about his woes as if he's narrating a (florid, amateurish) novel. He's got a philosophical interest in the drealm, and loves his daughter and wife back home.

He believes in suppressing the 'dangerous' emotions which manifest monsters and magic, so to battle without engaging his own, he wields a machine that converts potions into a wide variety of AOE sprays.

He's inspired by a combination of MARDEK's Saul and the depressed soul from Legion.

Pierce

Another weird bald man who's spent all 40 of his years in a monastery, but never fit in due to his shrill belligerence and melodramatic lecturing and tantrums. His doting Mumsie still loves him though. He feels trapped and stifled and longs for escape.

In battle, he summons monster allies and bolts of destructive lightning.

He's inspired by MARDEK's Muriance.

Emotive Interactions

Dialogue scenes merge silliness with serious themes, and a lot of care has been put into a system which allows for a wide variety of facial expressions. Here's an example scene I wrote when practising writing the voices for these two characters:

I compose the music myself, as it's one of the most important aspects of games for me, and the one I most fondly remember from games I've loved in the past. I intertwine it completely with all the other aspects of the experience. For example, here's a musical theme for Savitr, where the form of the melody was inspired by hidden 'lyrics' which describe the character's overarching story:

Atonal Dreams is being created by a single person, Tobias Cornwall (I'm also the one writing this, hello). Back in 2007-2010, I released a series of free RPGs made in Flash called MARDEK (recently ported to Steam), which were played by millions and loved by many, and I've been getting messages of appreciation from fans of the series ever since.

I wanted to make another game in a similar vein using the skills I've built up in the more-than-a-decade since then. Originally I planned this to be a 'reimagining' of the MARDEK story, called Divine Dreams, but the story was of such a scale that I'd need to release it in parts for it to be feasible.

Making money from indie games is tough and unreliable though, and I didn't want to get locked into a years-long project that might not earn enough to pay basic living costs.

Atonal Dreams is meant as a sort of prequel to what I've planned for Divine Dreams, to gauge interest in this kind of game. If it's successful enough, I'll happily make Divine Dreams as three chapters, each about twice as long as Atonal Dreams is meant to be! If it's a financial flop, then the story's written in such a way that it won't feel incomplete; it doesn't end on a cliffhanger or anything.

I'm doing literally everything myself: the coding, the graphics, the music, the writing, the animation, the general concept. It's exhausting and time-consuming hard work, but it's fulfilling and I hope others can get something out of the results when it's done.

If you're interested in supporting the development of this game, I have a Patreon account, where I post development updates fairly regularly. I also post updates on my blog at on alorafane.com every week!

I struggle with getting the word out; promotion is going to be the biggest obstacle to this being financially successful, I feel. So if you like what you see here, let others know too!

I'm aiming for a release before the end of 2020, but it's still early yet, so I'll continue updating this page as things progress.