The Triple Creek Murder
May, 2025
Why build one when you could build two? That was the conclusion that my friend Jason and I came to when he asked me back in February to help make a birthday game for his daughter. If we were building a game for her, we should also build a game for my son, who's birthday is also in April. After much exploration and experimentation with several different ideas, we ultimately designed a common game structure that was customized for each party. That gave us two, unique games, but they shared many of the same core beats, which made it easier to complete. Additionally as a first for me, I handed off the hardware and software to someone else to run on their own.
This version drew more directly from The Specter of Grosvenor Place, similarly starting the kids in a 1920's dinner party. But like Dragon's Lair, the game started with a knock at the door and the delivery of a police evidence box. In the box was a folder of police reports, collected evidence, a cassette player, and a stack of cassettes.
Excitedly, the girls tried but struggled to figure out how to open the tape cases, and with a little help, they got it playing in the tape deck.
The voice of Hayes County sheriff Connor Mayview played through the tape player, laying out the case. Recorded in 1985, Connor explained that he had been investigating the case for the last forty years, having taken it over when his father, Sheriff Mark Mayview retired. The elder Mayview was the original investigator for the 1925 suicide of Grace Donald. Grace Donald was discovered late one evening in May, slumped over the grave of her mother in the family graveyard at the back of their ranch. An empty poison bottle remained in her hand, and clearly after arguing with her father that night about wanting to marry her boyfriend, she committed suicide.
But Mark Mayview never fully felt the case was settled. A second cassette tape contained an interview between Connor and his father where Mark explained that he was never satisfied with the suicide ruling. Ever since the case was initially closed, he had recurring dreams of Grace Donald visiting him, repeatedly saying that "justice is in the cards." Sheriff Mark Mayview spent the next forty years trying to dig deeper into the case to determine Grace's real cause of death. Upon his retirement, he handed off the case to his son, Connor.
Connor wasn't successful, either. A third cassette contained Connor's account and a description of all the evidence he received from his father, and that he continued to track down. Newspaper articles, documents, and photographs were all organized in the evidence box, waiting for the next person to take up the investigation. Then, near the end of the interview, the recording became full of static, and a woman's voice appeared. "Open the justice card! Match the eyes! Justice is in the cards!"
In the evidence box was a sealed bag containing a Justice tarot card with an illustration of an eye on the reverse side. Debate ensued among the girls at the party. Should they open it? The instructions on the bag explicitly say not to! But the voice is telling us to! After some debate they opened the bag and took out the tarot card.
The girls also had discovered an ornate wooden box. Opening the lid, the found the inside contained a wooden bottom with the same eye at the center. Jason's daughter was immediately even more curious than we anticipated, and realized she could pry the wooden bottom out, getting a peek at some of our technical handiwork underneath. Quickly, Jason noticed and had her put the bottom back; disaster averted.
The girls figured out they needed to put the tarot card in the box, but when they did, nothing happened. After reviewing the end of the third tape, they caught the important instruction to "match the eyes" and tried again.
The lights flickered in the room as a static hum could be heard. The magic box made a tapping sound, and then the voice of Grace appeared. Excitedly, Grace explained that she used to live where the girls are now when the property was still her family ranch in 1925. One evening while sitting beside her mother's grave, she heard someone approach and then attack her. The next thing she knew, Grace was stuck between two worlds. She knew that the person that murdered her must have been at the ranch that night, and she needed the girl's help to figure out who did it.
Grace continued that she had previously read tarot cards for each guest at the ranch that night, and that each person was strongly connected with their own card. Grace had buried those cards on the property under an old oak tree, and if the girls could find the tree and dig up the cards, Grace would work with them to find out which one was the killer. Grace marked a hidden path to the correct tree with small, painted rocks. All the girls needed to do was to find those rocks and follow them! And then Grace's voice disappeared, the lights returned to normal, and the evening's music resumed as though nothing had happened.
Armed with their challenge, the girls set out of the house to discover and find the painted rocks that eventually led them to the old oak tree. Five cards were buried at the base of the old oak tree and the girls took them, returning triumphantly to the house.
One by one, the girls put a tarot card into the wooden box. With each one Grace again appeared and explained whose card it was. Then using the power of the card, Grace summoned the card's owner and channeled back to that evening in 1925 to the exact point when the murder occurred. Grace asked the girls to listen carefully to see if they could detect any clues that would implicate each person as the murderer.
Every scene played out like a short, 1930s radio play.
The girls met Grace's father, Tex, and heard him forcefully tell Grace that she could not marry her boyfriend William
They met Burl, her gambling prone, trouble causing older stepbrother.
Helen, her stepmother with a broken leg, spoke with Grace, telling her that she must convince her father to sell the ranch to William's father.
When the card was played for Grace's stepsister Alice, the girls learned that Alice is secretly involved with the stableboy.
And finally, the card for William brought back the scene of Grace telling him that her father had forbidden their marriage, and then continued as William stormed off to speak with her father directly.
Now, given all the accounts of where people were, and all the documents in the sheriff's evidence box, Grace asked "who did it?"
The girls discussed and debated as they reviewed the evidence. Was William involved with Grace only to get the ranch? Alice seemed suspicious and was arguing with Grace earlier. But wait. Something was off about the stepmother. In part of her scene, her crutches are nowhere near her. Is she faking that broken leg? The girls decided that Helen was responsible for Grace's murder and placed her card in the wooden box. Grace then appeared, realizing the girls were right.
The lights went out and Helen's voice appeared along with Grace. Confused, Helen asked where she was and what's going on. Grace accused and reprimanded her stepmother for murdering her that night. Helen explained that she did what she needed to do. She needed that old ranch to be sold so she could move comfortably back to the city and nothing was going to get in her way.
Furious, Grace told Helen that "we're going to finally bring justice" and instructed the girls to play the justice card one more time.
Tension had been building throughout the game and by this point, some of the girls were more than a little scared. The background sounds were building, spirits could be heard whispering in the corners, and the lights kept flickering on and off. Everyone was hesitant to play the justice card, not knowing what could happen next. Ultimately Jason had to step in and convince them to play the final card.
Once more, the lights went dark and the sound of a gavel echoed through the room. The spirits, up until this point only whispering, now began swirling through the room. Calling and wailing, Helen began to realize she was in trouble. She yelled that she had already won, and that they couldn't harm her. But as the spirits grew louder, Helen realized her own end was near before screaming as she was sucked away.
Grateful, Grace thanked the girls for helping her. Then the sounds of that evening in 1925 could be faintly heard as the voice of William called out to Grace. Together again and finally at peace, they now could move on together. The lights rose, music played, and the game successfully ended.
The ending landed a bit off for the girls. As with each of these games, we don't really get to play test enough to know how it will actually play out, and we probably made it too easy. Had they guessed other suspects first and played their cards, Grace would have been heard theorizing as to why they could or could not have done it. But because the girls jumped directly to the end, the flow of the last act fell a bit short.
Regardless, the game was a hit, and I'm told everyone enjoyed themselves, even if it was a bit scary.
Although this game followed the same structure as Dragon's Lair, there were several, unique challenges. First, with over 20 minutes of dialog between six or seven characters, recording and mixing took more time than expected to produce. Jason wrote the script and voice acted every character, often with multiple takes. He sent me the recordings and I then used ElevenLabs to swap Jason's voice with different AI voices for each character. Through trial and error we learned how to get as much emotional range out of each AI voice as possible, and although it's not world class acting, the final result worked quite well. Editing and mixing with sound effects was also more work than I planned. Some of the effects are mixed directly into the dialog tracks, while others are mixed dynamically as the game plays to be reactive to the player's actions. Getting all of this to balance and play well together brought us right up to our deadline.
I also had to package up Director, the software system that runs these games, in a way that Jason could run at his house, in another state, without any of my involvement. Director isn't fully production level software, and I often make last minute changes or fixes right up until the game plays. That was not going to be an option this time. Using pyinstaller and PySide6, I built a macOS desktop app that Jason could install and run Director on his own. Director also has a companion web app named Stage Manager that lets the game's operator take control of the game flow to rewind, skip, or trigger in-game actions, if needed. I added the ability for Director to show a QR code that can be scanned by your phone to quickly log into and access Stage Manager without the need for special URLs or user accounts.
Getting Director connected to Jason's lights was also needed, so I added auto discovery for the Lutron Caseta system. When Director starts, it looks to see if there is a Lutron hardware bridge on the same network, and if so, walks you through the pairing process. This worked just as planned.
Finally, ensuring the magic box could connect to his wifi network was the one thing I could not fully test beforehand. The magic box uses an Adafruit Feather ESP32-S3 as its embedded computer, and I needed to write the wifi details into the firmware. Although I did have an emergency process to get Jason new firmware, that was not something I wanted to try to do remotely. But when he first tried to use the magic box, it would not connect to his network. We methodically worked through what could be wrong over a long phone call, and realized that the network name programmed into the magic box had inadvertently capitalized the first letter in the network name, but Jason's network actually used all lowercase letters. Rather than sending new firmware, we figured out how to create a guest network using the same spelling, and like magic, the box connected and worked.
I was concerned Jason might get some curious questions from the TSA when he took the magic box onto the plane for his flight home. Underneath a false bottom, was a series of circuit boards, wires, two batteries, and a solenoid that was used to cause tapping sounds to come from the box itself. We removed and packed the batteries separately, and I gave Jason a document describing what the box was with my contact details just in case. But apparently the TSA didn't bat an eye, and he had no questions on the way home.
This was also the first one of these games I've built where I never saw it performed. There is something wonderful about the idea that these productions only happen once, without much rehearsal, and then are gone. I did receive updates from Jason as the evening went on, but I'll never see this one in action. Regardless, it was a success, and of course, we're already talking about what's next.
This is as much Jason's production as it is mine. But thank you to Jason for all the great collaboration over beers at Paulista.
Thanks to my two kids for play testing along the way and giving feedback.
And thanks to Beth and Layla for putting up with all of this and for your support along the way.