Turbo Pudding

Twelve NeighborsDev diary

A phone that never stops buzzing

· The Turbo Pudding team · 4 min read

A small kitchen at night under a yellow hanging lamp: Juror Seven, a young woman with long light brown hair, freckles and a tired, worried face, stands in the middle in a sage green Lark Co-op hoodie; behind her are green kitchen cabinets, wallpaper with tiny brown sprigs, a window with a streetlight and the Harrow water tower in the dark, a sink and a stove clock on the left, and a fridge with a mountain picture and a pizza magnet on the right

In Harrow, everybody’s phone buzzes, and Juror Seven’s buzzes most. A good part of Twelve Neighbors happens on that phone: the family chat, Paloma’s podcast comments, the town’s neighbors’ group and calls from Mom on her night shift. It’s Wednesday, so here’s how we built it, plus two smaller props, a chalkboard and a notebook.

The picture at the top is chapter 3, late at night. Juror Seven is home from the Harvest Festival, tired, in a Lark Co-op hoodie, and the notebook waits on the kitchen table. Then the phone rings. It’s Mom, calling from her night shift: “Baby. I’ve got four minutes.”

A phone inside the scene

The phone is never a menu. It opens over the scene, right where the heroine is standing, and the place stays behind it: the square in the morning, a dark county road, the festival. In our script, a chat takes one line to open and one to close, and the messages in between are written like any other dialogue.

The phone has three modes. A chat is a messenger, with the other person’s messages on the left and the heroine’s on the right. A feed is a post with comments under it. A call shows who’s calling, rings until you answer and then starts its own clock, minutes and seconds, while the lines run as subtitles.

Typing…

A message from someone else never just appears. First come the typing dots, for a moment that grows with the length of the message, up to a couple of seconds. A quick “so…” lands almost at once. A long message makes you wait, the way real ones do. The heroine’s own messages go out at once.

When it’s your turn to answer, the choices turn into reply chips at the bottom of the phone, and the one you tap is sent. Sending and receiving each have their own little sound, made in code like every other sound in the game. And a save made in the middle of a chat lands you back in the same chat, with the same messages on the screen.

The comments section

A feed is where Harrow talks about the trial, and Harrow has opinions. The town group, Harrow Neighbors, opens with a note from the admin: “Please keep it kind, neighbors. We all have to live here after.” Underneath, it goes about as well as town groups go, down to a comment that was removed by an admin.

The courthouse square on a sunny autumn morning, with red-brick buildings, arched windows, a lamppost, a park bench and round red, orange and yellow trees on both sides, and an American flag on the right; in the middle, a tall phone shows the Harrow Neighbors group: bettyjo44 writes in capitals that Kim is in everyone’s hearts, marlene_quilts is thinking of Kim with a red heart, harrow_hal says Russ gave his boy a job when nobody else would, owlsdad4life asks why the truck was there, a gray comment was removed by an admin, and pielady62 thanks whoever keeps deleting the nasty ones
Search: “small town drama game.” Comment removed by admin.

Every comment has a name, a time and a number of likes. The times and the likes are fixed for each comment, so if you reload the page, nothing shifts. A few comments show an exact clock time instead of “23m.” When one does, the time is worth a second look.

Paloma’s podcast, Harrowing, has its own comments. Under episode 31, the town argues about pie and hardware stores. Then one more commenter shows up, lanternlight, who seems to know things nobody outside the courtroom should know.

A county road at night under a starry sky and a crescent moon, seen from a car stopped at a red stop sign on Elm Street, with a farmhouse with lit windows on the left and a dark truck with one glowing headlight on the right; in the middle, a phone shows the comments under Harrowing, episode 31: “The Jury. Forty neighbors. Fourteen stickers. One barn.” pielady62 is standing with Russ, owlsdad4life calls it fourteen people who all ate his pie, cornfieldcarl asks if the hardware store is sponsoring this, pielady62 answers that it’s her family’s hardware store, and at the bottom, in orange, lanternlight writes: Juror 7 wrote “Everyone does.” Brave.
Searched “mystery game with a comments section.” Someone’s typing.

You can report that comment, reply to it or close the app. Report it, and “A little gray banner thanks me and promises a review within three to five business days.”

At the festival, Paloma goes live from the courthouse steps, and the feed turns into a live chat. Within minutes, someone tells her the camera is sideways.

The Harvest Festival on the courthouse square on a bright day, under strings of colorful pennants: a Chili Cook-off stand with eight numbered pots on the left, three kids riding a hay wagon below it, a tamales stand and a cider and donuts stand on the right, red-brick buildings, autumn trees and an American flag behind; in the middle, a phone shows Harrowing LIVE, where Paloma’s post says she’s live from the Harvest Festival, the cider is hot and the chili is a choice, pielady62 laughs that someone entered a cherry pie in the chili, bettyjo44 writes in capitals that Paloma’s camera is sideways, kenz.owls asks if that’s the juror girl in the cider line, and harrow_hal says to leave the jurors alone
People also ask: why is the livestream sideways?

Chalk, one stroke at a time

The game opens in the jury room, with one line: “Let’s vote again.” The votes go up on a chalkboard as tally marks, four upright strokes and a fifth across. Each stroke is drawn on its own, about a third of a second after the last, with its own scratch of chalk, and each one leans a little, so the board looks written by hand. Tap, and the count finishes at once. When the jury votes again, the board only adds the new strokes.

A notebook nobody reads

At the end of each day, at the kitchen table, the heroine writes a verdict for the day in the notebook the judge handed out: Guilty, Not guilty or I don’t know. “Nobody in the world knows what I just wrote.”

Those verdicts become a row of small squares, red for guilty, green for not guilty and white for I don’t know. The Compare verdicts button makes a link for a friend with one digit per verdict, with no name and no save in it. When the friend opens it, the row is kept in their browser, and from then on every chapter’s recap shows the friend’s verdict next to yours, marked “same as you” or “not like you.”

A tab that calls you back

After chapter 1, switch to another tab, and the game’s tab quietly renames itself: “Juror Seven, come back.” And open the browser’s console, and there’s a note waiting: “Hello, Seven. You opened the console. Everybody looks, sooner or later.”

Chapters 1 and 2 are free to play in your browser at twelveneighbors.com. The full game, all seven chapters, is $9.99, paid once. More about the game is on the Twelve Neighbors page.

More about Twelve Neighbors