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Krzysztof Pławski
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PowerWash Simulator VR

Bringing a 17-million-player console game to a mobile chipset — from an unstable 20 fps to a stable 90 fps on Meta Quest.

© FuturLab

The challenge

PowerWash Simulator is a multi-platform game with 17 million players. It was designed for flat screens and console hardware. The job was to bring it to Meta Quest, a standalone headset running on a mobile chipset, without losing what makes it satisfying.

When I started, the game ran at an unstable 20 fps on the headset. In VR that isn’t a polish problem. It makes players feel sick.

My approach

I started out as a flexible one-person sub-team and owned the VR port end to end. The team grew with the project: one person for the first 18 months, two for the next six, and five for the final seven. The job was to port a flat-screen game’s systems, input and UX to VR, and then fit the whole thing into a standalone headset’s CPU and GPU budget.

  • Port the whole game. I brought the existing game’s systems, input and UX across to VR, and implemented all of its diegetic UI (see below).
  • Multiplayer. I implemented multiplayer in the VR version. It works the same way as in the base game: room-based co-op on Photon PUN2, server-authoritative. The main player opens a room and shares the room code with the others. It supports 2 players in career mode and 6 in free play.
  • Cut nothing from the base game. The frame rate came from the renderer and the levels, not from removing content. I used Application SpaceWarp and Fixed Foveated Rendering, and put a lot of effort into optimising the VR levels: frustum culling, 360° environment captures, 2D sprites in place of distant geometry, LODs and mesh combining.
  • Make it sound and feel right in VR. Many sounds were replaced with spatial variants through FMOD to improve immersion, and the locomotion was tuned for comfort (see below).
  • Protect the experience. Every optimisation had to leave the player experience intact. A frame-rate win that feels worse in the headset isn’t a win.
Quest performance budget

  • Application SpaceWarp

    The app renders fewer frames; the runtime synthesises the in-between ones from motion vectors.

  • Fixed Foveated Rendering

    The edges of each lens are shaded at lower resolution, where the eye notices least.

  • Level optimisation

    Frustum culling, LODs and mesh combining, with 360° environment captures and 2D sprites standing in for distant geometry.

  • Spatial audio placement

    Many sounds replaced with spatial variants through FMOD, for immersion.

  • Locomotion tuning

    A hybrid crouch: real crouching carries into the game, and a button covers players who sit.

The target was a frame rate that stays at the headset's refresh rate — without the player feeling any of the cuts.

Locomotion and comfort

Comfort matters more in VR than on a flat screen, so the VR version gives players a lot of choice:

  • Movement: teleportation, or smooth artificial locomotion steered by head or hand direction. Players can toggle between the two. There is also an arm-swinger mode, where swinging your arms as if walking or running moves you.
  • Turning: smooth turning, or snap turning with adjustable increments (for example 22, 30 or 45 degrees) to reduce motion sickness.
  • Posture: standing or seated play. We chose a hybrid crouch: if you crouch in real life, your stance in the game follows accurately, and a button changes stance for players who play seated. There is also an artificial crouch for reaching difficult spots without physical strain, and a prone position for low ones.
  • Handedness: left- or right-handed, so players can put spraying and movement on their dominant hand.

Diegetic UI and the pop-out watch

I implemented all of the diegetic UI in PowerWash Simulator VR: interface that lives in the game world instead of floating over it.

Its centrepiece is a quick-access watch I designed and built. It started out showing job progress and messages. Then I added buttons for the most common VR actions, so players could skip unnecessary trips through menus. The watch now gives quick access to:

  • job progress
  • the money in the bank
  • in-game messages
  • a height reset button
  • a locomotion style switch
The pop-out watch on the player's wrist in PowerWash Simulator VR, showing 21% cleaned, $1,535.25, quick settings and a job message while the player cleans a Mars rover

The watch open on the player’s wrist: job progress, money, quick settings and a job message. © FuturLab

I made it a pop-out watch to increase immersion. A floating menu with no clear origin looked too jarring in the headset.

The trade-off: a wrist UI is only visible when you look at it, so messages were easy to miss. I built a delayed message display system so no in-game message gets lost. Later I added a slight periodic haptic buzz on the watch hand while a message is waiting, plus a notification icon next to the washer fold-out, another piece of UI that was my idea.

Outcome

  • Performance went from an unstable 20 fps to a stable 90 fps on Quest.
  • PowerWash Simulator VR won Best UK Mixed Reality Game (VR, AR, XR) at the Ukie Awards 2024.
  • It was a finalist for Best VR/AR/XR/MR Game at the TIGA Awards 2024.

What I learned

Converting a game to VR takes far more than setting up the VR interactions and features. A lot of the work was performance, and a lot of that was trial and error. I also learned the hard way that the zip format and compression level matter for .obb files.