DEEP SPOILER WARNING!
Contains many spoilers about the story of Broken Minds.
This page is sort of experimental — it's a posting of various notes created during the development of Broken Minds. Commentary by LockedOff on these notes is in italics, for clarity. The notes themselves have not been edited in any way to be more presentable for this wiki, to maintain integrity, and so may contain spelling/grammatical errors.
Our Sin Notes[]
The first few notes made for the game, back when it was about terrorists committing arson.
PREMISE You play as a young woman who gets involved in an investigation after being stalked by a group of killers who set her house ablaze.
CHARACTER Noa [redacted] - humble and codependent, wants food, attention, shelter Poor and uneducated Noa is unknowingly greedy, lacking social skills and other life essentials and leaning too heavily on others, but her innocence makes her endearing. She's secretly cruel, torturing people "unknowingly" and subtly destroying them. Doesn't say please or thank you. Wears cute outfits LIAR /MORALLY GREY/ NICE /DISTANT/ SAD /ANTI-HERO/
As you can see, I changed most of this later, but it's always good to start with something. The "personas" listed there were actually still just different moods Noa was in and had nothing to do with multiple personalities yet. Also, at this point I'd thought it would be interesting to treat it like a documentary and redact the character's last names for "protection", but that idea didn't stick.
Takuma [redacted] - sad and cruel, wants appreciation, respect, choices to be made without him At first seems cool but he's really a terrible person. He does all the legwork. He's the "lone wolf" Wears bloodstained clothes
Bloodstained clothes would've been unhygienic, especially for a detective. "Choices to be made without him" is contradictory, but the rest is pretty accurate.
Ume [redacted] - quiet and humorous, wants silence, work, to be taken less seriously At first she seems distant and emotionless but then her wicked deadpan sense of humor is revealed. She's the "interrogator" and the IT guy. Wears big sweaters
"Wears big sweaters" may come back at some point, in another character. ;)
Yuzuki [redacted] - mature and damaged, wants to be normal, to pity others, to dismiss others Yuzuki is odd. Forgetful, weak, and mentally unstable, she's the group's leader but she's crushingly pathetic. At first she seems well adjusted but soon it becomes apparent how far gone she is. Needs constant supervision. She wears cool glasses.
Now I wish I'd given Yuzuki some cool glasses. Oh well.
TONE Horror realism/digipunk Uses folders and walls of text as motifs. Backgrounds are realistic and detailed.
I knew the tone I wanted pretty much right away. Tone is mostly what inspires me to create things, and it's what I try to be consistent and specific with the most.
PLOT
Chap 1 "Fire Works" Scene 1 HOUSE INT A normal day for Noa becomes a nightmare as suddenly she's surrounded on all sides by terrible grinning masked arsonists. Flames suddenly appear and envelop her. CHOICE: Rescue Grandma or Not
If you do not, Noa will have more extreme trauma from the fire and will develop a phobia of it. She will also be depressed during the beginning of the second scene. If you do, then Noa will get a third degree burn on her leg that she cannot treat, so wears a cast, and she feels more energetic initially.
The idea of a "villain" appearing suddenly in a window was an early inspiration that stayed in the game.
Opening AMV A nice OP to get players in the mood
Scene 2 AGENCY INT The detective agency is in the middle of working on the case, labeling it a "hate crime" for the message in English that was spray painted across the wreckage a day later: "poor show". They think it's a cryptic message signifying the class divide. Noa takes advantage of the team by eating all their food and then revealing that they won't be paid. Unfortunately it's too late for the team to retract their offer of help.
Not sure what I was thinking with this. Gee, sharing these notes is a little more embarrassing than I thought it'd be...
Scene 3 BANK INT As Takuma goes to withdraw savings from the bank to get money for food, the bank is robbed by another group of masked criminals. He decides to fall in with their ranks and spy on them from the inside.
That's a lot of ground to cover in just one scene. This was back when I was planning on making this game in a month, so already I'm being too ambitious, which is something I realized before my next draft.
Scene 4 AGENCY INT This bank robbery is merely one of many, many many. While the team watches in horror, Noa noses around the agency and comes across what she thinks is a horrible secret.
Not sure what the secret was going to be in this draft. I don't think I'd figured it out yet.
CHAP2 cutscene Stocks plummeting, numbers counting down to zero.
Chap 2 "Hungry"
- 10 days later - Scene 1 AGENCY INT Food supplies are completely down. Nobody can think straight. The terrorists are blowing up buildings left and right and fires are spreading everywhere. Yuzuki has been usurped by Ume and is sniveling in a corner. Takuma is missing. Everyone's trapped in the small city. They're under constant watch by terrorists who have hacked all the security cams. Yuzuki answers the door to one of the terrorists and in her unhinged state, unwittingly becomes a terrorist, after which the terrorist hands her a bomb. This results in a tense negotiation game where you must choose the right things to say to Yuzuki to keep her from blowing you up.
The idea of Yuzuki becoming an unwitting terrorist is kind of funny. Maybe I should revisit that in some capacity.
This was where I stopped outlining this plot, and gave myself feedback. I often do this after writing plots for things, it helps me think stuff through. Compiling all my self-critiques could probably fill a decent-sized novel by now.
Okay, first of all, think SHORT. I don't want this to be a long game. Three chapters at most, I'd prefer it to be two. Second, supporting choices isn't a good idea right now. right now the enemies in the game are "terrorists". How vague, distant and generic. Let's make this more interesting by cutting it down to focus on the emotions. What is this story mostly about? Arson. It's literally the title. That's all you have to keep! Other than that, it's about exploring a realistic, creepy world. Time to boil it down to three parts: the fun horror beginning, an agency mind games middle, and a satisfying classic mystery end.
Sometimes it takes months and months for me to finally give myself useful feedback, but this time, I was right on the money, and helped myself get to the meat of the story almost right away. You'll see from the following revised outline that from this point onward there wasn't too much that fundamentally changed about the story other than the plot element of multiple personalities and Dr. Uzumaki's involvement.
Scene 1 HOUSE INT "living the nightmare" A normal day for Noa becomes a nightmare as suddenly she's surrounded on all sides by terrible grinning masked arsonists. Flames suddenly appear and envelop her. Features: explore a creepy house with a great sound environment as killers stalk you. Notes: includes a mirror. Shows Her parents, lots of pictures of her parents being great.
I never included those pictures in the finished environment. Guess there weren't any.
OPENING ! Shows Noa being led out of the fire.
Scene 2 AGENCY INT Noa brings her case to a detective agency. The case is launched. The killers send a message to the detectives, threatening more harm to Noa. The detectives repeatedly question Noa to discover if she has any enemies. Money needs to be sent to the criminals. The detectives decide not to send any. Noa's parents are killed. Features: Explore the headquarters of the agency while the detectives work on the case.
It's interesting how this version of the plot slightly shifts the blame for Noa's parents' death onto the detectives, for not putting up the money. That could be an interesting angle to explore in the future.
Scene 3 PARENT'S APARTMENT Work with the detectives to find clues to Noa's parents deaths: Lots of money, untouched, in the safe cracked open by Ume. They solve the murder, which turns out to be a clever timed death trap device. Working together makes them bond and become a stronger detective team than before. Noa is the killer. Her parents abandoned her after her needyness and she became desperate for friends and attention. In her sick way, she believed that she could befriend whoever helped her with her tragedy. She created the video herself. "They loved each other, and that was more than enough for them. They never had time to love me." "You were able to solve my mystery... Im so happy..." She's put behind bars, ironically uniting the disparate agency that she was trying to befriend. Features: explore a luxury apartment and collect clues to solve a murder case.
Because I was trying to finish this game in a month, I ended up just having Noa's parents killed in her apartment instead of their own. It ended up working well. I like the contrast between the apartment before and after the murder, and the detectives "invading Noa's space". Plus it gives players another chance to get used to the layout of the apartment, which is very useful knowledge once the Logic Trains begin.
MYSTERY FIGURING OUT The big trick in this mystery is how Noa killed her parents when she was nowhere near them. The easiest way to come up with a trickiful mystery is to first consider the method of death, which is the anchor point that ties everything else together.
This note was basically me stalling for time while I don't have any solutions to my plot problems. A lot of my notes are like this.
What this murder needs to do: disguise itself as a gruesome terrorist hostage killing, hide any sign that a person was not present to do the killing, only kill the victims at a particular time, needs to be simple so that nobody suspects a death trap
Choking (X, too elaborate, difficult to time) Via: snake (callback to speckled band?), choked from inside the throat?, ties? Struggling? Suffocation Via: pillow,
Heart Attack Via: pacemaker. Perfect! Now to just disguise that with something else. When they called the phone, a particular ringtone disrupted the pacemaker and then played a sound that activated the pillows. Poison Lipstick CPR on wife results in death
Calls can't go out.
Here's what went down: First, Noa visits her parents. She replaces her mother's lipstick with poisonous lipstick. Then she places viruses in their phones that keep them from picking up when called. She plants special pillows with bombs inside them that propel shot when triggered by a particular sound. As she leaves, she steals the keys to the house, and locks them inside.
Wife starts to die from a heart attack as soon as the phone rings. Husband tries to resuscitate her and dies. The ringtone ends, and plays a special sound. The sound activates the pillows, which have been carefully strewn across the messy apartment, which explode and make the place and people in it look like it'd been hit by a terrorist group.
Clues: Pictures show the house already messy A pillow didn't activate. The phone ringtone, which is very strange indeed, is accidentally activated, and it will explode the remaining pillow if you activate it in the right spot.
If you thought the mystery in Broken Minds seemed a little far-fetched, it's because I literally spent maybe an hour or two initially mapping it out. Later I added a lot more detail to the mystery once Uzumaki was upgraded to a significant role.