‘Zombies Noir: Mixed Reality’ Brings the Undead to Your Own Home on Meta Quest 2 + Pro

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Jun 15, 2023

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The point of most zombie video games is to keep the shambling horde away from you. But in Zombies Noir: Mixed Reality, you’re inviting them into your actual home to complete a series of missions—and you’ll end up blasting them away with a wide variety of guns and weapons all the same. It’s a unique action game that shows the power of mixed reality (MR), and it’s now available on Meta Quest 2 + Pro for $9.99 USD.

Developer Synodic Arc used our Presence Platform technology to create a tense and compelling room-scale MR experience that blends the physical and virtual worlds together. By using Scene Understanding and Passthrough, Zombies Noir: Mixed Reality can scan your room and furniture and make them an essential part of the game. How you see your surroundings will differ depending on which headset you have: Passthrough on Meta Quest 2 shows up in black and white while Meta Quest Pro uses stereoscopic color Passthrough.

Your goal in the game is to complete wave-based missions by eliminating the undead threat. They enter your space through doorways that are actually portals to Noir City, the home of this well-dressed zombie horde, and they’ll start piling into your room at a rapid pace. When you're between rounds, you’ll be able to upgrade your weapons at the shop and gain other bonuses like increased health and damage.

To celebrate the launch of Zombies Noir, we spoke to Synodic Arc Founder and Lead Programmer Michael Pulis and Art Lead Daniel Peterson about their inspirations behind the game and their thoughts on the future of MR.

Where did the idea for Zombies Noir come from? Why did you want to build it in mixed reality?

Daniel Peterson: Initially the idea came from playing countless hours of Call of Duty’s Nazi Zombies mode. This was before the Quest Pro came out, and Quest 2 had greyscale Passthrough so we decided the theme of the game would be like a black and white noir film. Mixed reality is such a new and exciting technology. It’s always a risk making a game for new and untested tech, but the team had faith that people would love defending themselves in their actual home.

Plus as someone who gets dizzy in VR, it’s much easier to find my bearings with Passthrough and being able to see the floor.

MR is a pretty new field for games. What’s it been like being one of the first teams to embrace the technology and build for it? Any fun anecdotes from development?

DP: We have a great relationship with Meta. And it felt like they really cared about the feedback we gave for improvements as we made Zombies Noir. There were many times during development where when a bug came up, it was unclear if it was because of the hardware or because of the programming, and that added some unique challenges.

Michael Pulis: As exciting as it was to be one of the first teams to develop for MR, it came with a lot of challenges. There wasn’t anyone else or any previous games to turn to. We were thrown into the deep end and had to hope that the technologies worked. Fortunately, we were able to contact Meta and explain the difficulties we had which led to them responding to our feedback.

There’s actually one area of the Oculus Integration plugin code that has a large comment block based on a bug I ran into. Unity and Oculus have different coordinates, which meant that at one point the walls from the Scene API were all rotated an extra 90 degrees! That was pretty funny to see.

What kind of technical challenges did you face, and how did you overcome them?

DP: AI pathing was an interesting challenge. If you turn on furniture in your space and add collisions, the zombies would be forced to path around the furniture a lot of the time, which could completely break their pathing. Unfortunately, when you don't add the collisions it messes with immersion—some zombies can look like they are clipping through furniture. But for the most part it doesn't detract from the experience, especially if you’re playing in a big open room.

MP: There were so many! Fortunately, lots of experimentation with Unity’s fast build times let us figure things out. One interesting issue was that at one point we needed transparent objects to appear on top of Passthrough, but it wouldn’t work. We found a hacky solution by adding a 1/255 transparent UI layer. Nobody notices the UI layer in front of the player, but it adds another rendering pass which means that the transparent objects get to show up!

Do you have any basic tips for developers who want to build MR games?

DP: Try to think of MR as being completely different from VR. What’re things you can make that are unique to experiencing in your own space? If you add too much VR then it may as well be a VR game. Also, make sure to not add too many objects on the ground. One major advantage to MR is Passthrough, but the safety that comes with being able to see things on the floor goes away if the floor is covered. So have either smaller assets or have everything placed on the walls and ceiling areas.

MP: I agree with Daniel. MR is not the same as VR. I’m sure there are some games that can be adapted to MR from a VR setting, but you’ll lose a lot of what makes the MR experience unique. Think of the game from the MR perspective first—that means thinking of every type of room a player can have, what you can do inside a room, and so on. There’s a lot of edge cases there because any room is a possibility!

What was your experience like on App Lab? How did the community there help influence the development of the game?

MP: I think one of the things we learned on App Lab was that we needed to clearly market our game as mixed reality. Zombies Noir launched without the “mixed reality” tag and also had fun cartoony art that didn’t let it stick out as anything unique. However, the few people that did play our game absolutely loved it. That reassured us a lot to not steer away from the direction of the game.

Are there any new features launching with the Meta Quest Store release?

DP: We’ve added quite a lot, such as new quest lines we call Case Files, new bosses, and lots of small quality of life fixes to make sure it runs at a smooth frame rate. We’ll be keeping an eye on any small issues players run into in the first few months of launch, but we also have some fun ideas for future content that are currently being kept secret.

What kind of potential do you see for MR games and apps in the future?

DP: There’s unlimited potential in the future of MR and the new Quest 3 will have even more power and less constraints for future titles. This technology is the most exciting leap I’ve seen in my lifetime towards gamifying reality.

MP: I’m super excited for the future of MR myself! Where we’re at now is only the beginning. Once there are fewer limitations like outdoor play, automatic room tracking, and simple multiplayer with people around you, I think we’ll see MR truly take off.

Anything else you’d like to share with our readers?

DP: If you’re interested in mixed reality, and are excited about futurism and new tech, go to the Meta Quest Store and get yourself a copy of Zombies Noir. MR is such a unique and fun experience. And I hope you enjoy defending your house from zombies!

Fight the undead from the comfort of your own room in Zombies Noir: Mixed Reality, out today on Meta Quest 2 + Pro.