Propagation: Paradise Hotel

The game

Propagation: Paradise Hotel is a single-player VR survival horror game developed and published by Wanadev Studio, released in May 2023. You play Emily Diaz, trapped in the Paradise Hotel during a zombie outbreak and looking for her sister, mixing stealth, exploration, resource management and combat.

My contributions

• Ported player movement and part of the UI to the Virtuix Omni One locomotion treadmill, through to publication on the platform store.
• Developed without the hardware: the treadmill was in the United States and the target OS was unavailable at first, leaving one build per evening and one round of feedback per day.
• Simulated the treadmill’s input with a joystick to work locally; the game was completed end to end through that simulation.
• Shipped debug commands to the remote testers so they could tune movement speed themselves rather than waiting a day per value.
• Worked closely with the design, QA and art teams to maintain high code quality.

Why it was interesting

Omni One is an omnidirectional treadmill: the player physically walks. Locomotion, input mapping and comfort assumptions that hold on a standard VR headset simply do not carry over. Teleport and stick-based movement stop making sense when your legs are the input device. The work was less a recompile than a re-think of every movement interaction against a different physical model, while keeping the frame budget intact on standalone hardware.