Turbo Pudding
Twelve Neighbors is a story about a jury, so for most of the game you are looking at faces. Twelve people sit around one table in the jury room, with an alternate on a folding chair by the wall, and the story only works if you can tell them apart at a glance. This is a page from our sketchbook: how the people of Harrow are put together.
Five bodies for a whole town
Every character in the game stands on one of five bodies. Body A is young, with narrow shoulders and a long neck: the heroine, Kaylee, Owen. Body B is a grown-up build, like Marcus and Dr. Park. Body C is big, with wide shoulders and a belly, like Travis and Tammy. Body D is for the oldest neighbors, with sloping shoulders and a shorter neck, like Earl, Gene and Patty. Body E is lanky, and it belongs to Wyatt alone.
Arm poses are shared too. Crossed arms, a hand on the hip, a hand at the chin and a phone held close are set out once and fit every body. And everybody is drawn at one scale, so heights on screen are true. Wyatt, at 191 centimeters, stands well over the heroine at 165, and nobody gets a few inches added for drama.
A nose of your own
The quickest way to turn twelve strangers into twelve people is the middle of the face. Every character has a head shape of their own, from oval, heart and round to square, long, pear and a boxy rectangle. Every character also has a nose, and it never changes with the mood: button, point, hook, round, broad or small.
Gene, juror six, has a long face and a hook nose. Dr. Park, juror eight, has a rectangular face, a small nose and glasses pushed up into the hair. Tammy, juror nine, is round with a button nose, and Travis, juror eleven, is square, with a broad nose and a goatee.
The eyes stay small and almond-shaped, each with a single spot of light. The bodies are five and a half to six and a half heads tall, the shortest ratio for the youngest faces. Big eyes are lovely, but in a courtroom drama a small eye under a heavy brow says more.
Faces that hold things back
Every expression is built from the same three parts: eyes, brows and a mouth, sometimes with a symbol and an arm pose added. The heroine, Juror Seven, has eighteen expressions. Most of the other jurors have seven or eight.
The mouths we needed most were not the big ones. A trial is full of people keeping quiet, so the face kit has a tight mouth with pressed lips, a bitten lip, and a wobble, the wavy line of someone trying very hard not to cry. Blush is a patch of printed dots on the cheeks, not a pink oval, and when somebody loses their temper, a puff of steam rises over their head.
Age, honestly
Nobody in Harrow is airbrushed. The face kit follows a simple rule for age: crow’s feet appear at 45, the lines from nose to mouth at 55, and at 70 come age spots and a softer jaw.
Earl, juror three, is 80, and he has every line in the book, plus thick white eyebrows and a brown hat. Kaylee, juror five, has none of them yet.
The sticker
Every juror wears a round JUROR sticker on the left side of the chest, with a big number and a color of their own. No two colors repeat in the jury room, so you can match a voice to a seat from across the table. The sticker color is printed a hair off register, like a cheap poster, and that is the only place the trick is used. Faces always stay clean.
Earl’s sticker started out straw yellow. Next to the heroine’s mustard, it nearly vanished in a small picture, so Earl went saddle brown.
Take a seat
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.
