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Atonal Dreams: Starring Savitr, Collie, Ossoum, and Pierce

4 years ago - Edited 4 years ago1,037 words

I've spent this week doing more story planning for this now-actually-named thing, Atonal Dreams, which has included drawing final designs of all the major characters. This eccentric bunch are the four playable ones!

The title I've decided on for this prologue thing starring Savitr is Atonal Dreams. I like how it sounds, and the meanings that could be extracted from it, and it connects well to Divine Dreams without adding any inelegant colons or subtitles.

I've spent this week working more on story planning, all while (still) wondering to what extent a well-planned story even matters for an indie game. Stories definitely have the potential to really stick with people, but I suppose they're not the primary thing with short games from little unknown developers? I don't know.

What I'm trying to do is have a general outline for all three parts of Divine Dreams, such that Atonal Dreams could heavily hint at and lead to those events in a sensible way (without requiring them to exist to be fulfilling in itself).

There's a lot of frustration involved when a creator makes up a series as they go along (such as with the Disney Star Wars trilogy, to use a not-really-comparable example). It's also frustrating for the creator; I know that from making MARDEK.

So I feel like this project's stuck in mud a bit at the moment, like showable progress is slow, because planning these things carefully takes time. Movie scripts typically take months, even years, and that's with multiple people doing just that role, usually! (The original Star Wars - again I know it's not really a fair comparison - ∞ had many different drafts over a couple of years before the final version emerged ∞, and that was before all the actual production.) I'm trying to do everything all at once by myself, and the burnout is real.

Having a clear plan will allow things to come along much more smoothly once the ball is rolling, but maybe it's best not to overplan now, since the whole idea with Atonal Dreams is to gauge whether Divine Dreams would even be viable. If not, then I'm only wasting my time planning it in detail now.

I think I've got enough planned for Atonal Dreams to make some more assets next week, so I should probably do that. It's important that I get to the point where I have stuff to show off for promotion sooner rather than later.



One of the things I've been doing as part of my planning is (re)drawing final designs of all the major characters in the story. I ∞ posted on my Patreon ∞ earlier in the week with these concept drawings of the four primary protagonists of Atonal Dreams:



Savitr is a renowned Seraph, who does what he can to bring light into the world to ease deep guilt he feels about past mistakes he made while not in his right mind.

Collie is excited to join Savitr as his Cherub apprentice, as he's been her hero since he saved her from the aggressive tribe in which she spent her volatile childhood. She wants to save people, like he saved her.

Ossoum is an eccentric, wimpy philosopher with a profound interest in the Drealm. He dispatches monsters using a machine he built together with his inventor wife, as he believes in suppressing emotions, despite talking like the narrator of a florid, pretentious (and poorly-written) novel while lamenting about the woes of the world.

Pierce grew up in the monastery of an order called the Beyond Ponderers (I called them the much blander 'Purple Monks' last week), who dwell on the eternal beyond. He's felt trapped and stifled there, so he summons monsters and bolts of lightning to express his volatile passions.



I've written about them in a bit more detail in the Patreon post, but I'll leave it at this for now. I've planned all of these characters, their story involvement, and their connections to other characters very thoroughly, but I can't exactly just blurt all that out here without spoiling everything!

They're all (loosely) based on characters from MARDEK, or their refined versions in Taming Dreams (Enki, Jacques/Donovan/Sharla (sort of) or just TD's Collie, Saul/Usaule/the depressed soul in Legion, Muriance), and I chose these four because I felt the overall story potential of exploring their beginnings here was greater than for any other characters.

Having two weird bald men and just one girl isn't exactly what I would have come up with if planning a box-tickingly diverse set of widely-appealing characters completely from scratch, but that's why it turned out this way!

I do wonder how they'll be perceived and received by people who don't have the background with them that I do, though. We'll see.

One of my patrons said they had a similar vibe to Earthbound, which I like as a comparison, since the quirky charm of that weird world won over many people, myself very much included.



Mental health and burnout issues have been consistently slowing things down more than I'd like for these past few weeks, and I'm very aware of things I should be doing but just keep putting off (choosing Discord mods, more research, etc). I'll get to them eventually! I hope. I'm getting at least something done every week, though. I probably need to make some lifestyle changes. Don't we all?

I do notice that interest in these posts has been waning rather than growing over time, though. Maybe I've talked about that already. Maybe it's just a lull and things will pick up once I start posting snazzier pictures, nearing completion, and doing promotion, or maybe I'll need to actually release this before more people will get on board. Currently my audience is people who played MARDEK years ago, so I need to release something new so then there's more than just nostalgia keeping people interested... It takes so much time, though, so I'm just trying to patiently stick with it for now.

Thanks to those of you who are patiently accompanying me on this journey!