The Specter of Grosvenor Place
August, 2024
Our daughter's birthday is in the summer, which means it's often hard to get friends together for a party. To ensure everyone could come, she opted to have a belated birthday party in August after most had finished their summer vacations. She loves mysteries and this year wanted to have a murder mystery dinner party. Beth and I were happy to oblige, but had some concerns. The typical "host a murdrer mystery dinner party" kits are fairly thin, and they require all participants to properly role play and hide and reveal their clues. We were not convinced that a bunch of teenagers would be fully into that, so we set out to design a game that let the party members participate and advance, but not control, the story.
All of the typical challenges again presented themselves. Busy life schedules left little time to write and make the game, and we had no real possibility of play testing ahead of time to know if the game would work. But, although it was down to the wire, we pulled it off and at the end of the event, our daughter's friends proclaimed that this was the best birthday party they had ever attended.
We started discussing possible themes and storylines at the beginning of summer. We briefly considered having actors play the main characters, but that felt too complex and time consuming. We reflected on the success of the Greenglass House party that used ghosts and voices to tell a story. Greenglass House was really just about listening to a story, but maybe we could we take that concept and make it interactive? Beth set out to write a murder mystery set in our home and I set out to design a way for a ghost to haunt the house and act as the game's narrator and main character.
Over the summer, Beth assembed a rich backstory for a cast of characters that would ultimately find themselves in our home. Young romance, a proporous ranching family that moved to join San Francisco society, jealousy, a marriage, and relocation to Oakland in the 1920s, all filled out the world of our cast of characters. Beth created artifacts including letters, journals, and photographs that documented and captured the lives of everyone in detail. As the structure of our game came together, we drew from the detailed backstory to assemble a plot and playable experience for everyone.
Our initial ambitions wanted each artifact to link to a specific character, and when playing the game, every interaction with a letter, photo, or object, would summon it's original author from the spirit world. Players would then piece together the mystery through these interactions. Furthermore, every player would wear a small piece of costume jewlery that would double as a tracker, so we would know where each player was in the house, allowing the spirits to materialize in the right place at the right time. I spent a week or so designing the tracking system before reaching the conclusion that I just didn't have enough time to build it before the party. We still wanted characters materializing around the house, but we would need another method to decide when and where they would appear.
About ten days before the party, we still didn't have a finished, detailed plot, or really any of the ability to get ghosts to materialze. We were also concerned that the deep backstory would be too challenging to understand during a single evening. We needed to simplify the story and the technology to hit our deadline. We slimmed down the story, removed some characters, and simplified their motivations to get to a three act structure. In the first act, Herbie, the husband, would materialize asking for help to solve the mysterious death of his wife Mimi and lead our players to the trove of research he kept. The second act would be filled with piecing together what happened, with Herbie joining to provide hints and additional backstory. In the final act, the players would solve the mystery and finally give Herbie the peace he sought.
Herbie would speak to players by broadcasting through the speakers throughout our house and his imminent arrival would be announced through flickering lights nearby. I dug out my Director software and got to work to add the ability to target audio to specific speakers over AirPlay. Using pyatv, I built the ability to direct audio to the different rooms in our house. However although I got it working, I found that the variable audio latency, sometimes up to 2 seconds, made it almost impossible to synchronize with my lighting controls. Also, I could only send audio files, and not dynamic streams. This prevented me from doing any realtime mixing to combine spirit voices with sound effects and music. With only a few days remaining, I ripped out all of the AirPlay work and returned to the existing audio system in Director, which is based on pygame. I would not be able to direct audio to different rooms, but I traded that for mixing control. Then at the last minute, I realized that unlike iOS, macOS cannot simultaneously target multiple AirPlay speakers, so I switched to use Airfoil to send audio to all the speakers in the house.
Director has the ability to control Hue and Lutron Caseta lights, which I again used to cause Herbie to take over the house lighting. Our dining room and living room did not yet have Caseta dimmers, but I swapped them out while the kids were away, ensuring I could control the lighting during the dinner party.
To explain why there were speakers everywhere, I borrowed a fitting soundtrack for the evening and used the background audio loop from the Disneyland Jungle Cruise, which is an excellent mix of early era jazz.
Guests knew they would be attending a 1920's themed dinner party and everyone was instructed to dress the part. Guests arrived wearing their 1920's finest and began the evening in the backyard. We hired our son and his friend to bartend and pass hors d'oeuvres while everyone arrived. At 6:00 PM, the music in the backyard was interrupted by a humming interferance, the garden lights went out and then flickered intermittently back to life, and then Herbie's voice came through, introducing the evening's mystery.
While drinks were served, our bartenders carefully gave some guests napkins that had morse code written on the edge. After Herbie's introduction, they found and decyphered the code, which lead them to a box in our hall closet, which contained all of Herbie's research. They assembled in the living room and got to work to unravel the mystery.
At my new studio, I'm working to develop a narrative game platform that has ambitions to be used not just in video games, but in physical spaces, too. I originally planned to run this event using that platform, but this proved to be too ambitious within the time we had. Instead, I quickly built a remote control application to run from my phone. The app gave me buttons to trigger story plot points, which in turn controlled the lights and sound throughout the house. I remained close enough to overhear their conversations and then triggered the right scene to give them hints or advance the story throughout the evening.
Beth assembled an amazing table, menu, and meal for all. After everyone played through the first part of the game and began to reach some conclusions, we served dinner. Initially conversation focused on the mystery, but as expected, it quickly drifted to other topics as everyone enjoyed themselves. I was definitely glad we chose to drive the game externally instead of relying on the guests to keep things moving.
As dinner concluded, Herbie materialized again in the dining room to re-engage them back into the game. After a bit of confusion, they were back at it, working to solve the mystery.
After dinner, Herbie materialized, but his connection to our world was quickly fading. He resorted to communicating through morse code by flashing the lights in the house, and after a few tries, was able to get out a message to our guests revealing the location of some additional information. After some searching in the backyard in dark, the guests found what they needed and were able to reveal Mimi's killer.
Herbie, excited that he now finally had the answers he needed after all these years, returned one last time to thank the party before he was able to finally get the peace he desired.
There are always things I'd do differently with more time and resources, but the party really was successful. It is always fun to build these adventures, especially with Beth, and it is immensely rewarding to see people engaged and enjoying what we created.
Thanks to all those that provided input, advice, and help make this happen!