The Cabin: Home Invasion

Drop Dead: The Cabin performance review

In late 2022, Frame Labs was contracted by (the VERY cool) Soul Assembly to provide technical support on their live VR title Drop Dead: The Cabin. At the time, Meta had recently introduced Application SpaceWarp, which lets developers render at a lower native framerate and synthesise intermediate frames to maintain smoother motion on headset hardware.

The Cabin was struggling to reliably hold the minimum performance target required for comfortable play and store compliance on Quest 2 hardware. My role for the first engagement was a focused, one-week performance investigation: identify bottlenecks, recommend fixes, and provide practical implementation notes and sample code to help the team integrate Application SpaceWarp in a production-safe way.

What I delivered in the 2022 review

• A targeted performance bottleneck breakdown (rendering, scene, and content hot spots)

• A technical review of ASW suitability and risks for the project

• Sample code and integration guidance tailored to the game’s structure and update cadence

Drop Dead: The Cabin - Home Invasion MR production support

After the performance work, Soul Assembly brought us back in to help develop a mixed reality mode inside the main Cabin experience. That MR mode became Home Invasion, which turns your physical room into the play space, with enemies breaking in through your real doors and windows. It was positioned as a flagship MR experience around the launch window of Meta Quest 3, and the mode received strong coverage from VR outlets and the wider Quest community.

From January to November 2023, I worked remotely with the Soul Assembly team through a high-pressure production march to get MR gameplay running reliably on evolving platform tech.

My responsibilities for Home Invasion

• MR enablement without breaking the live game
  Adapting existing Cabin systems, assets, and gameplay rules so MR could coexist with the shipped VR game and remain maintainable across updates.

• Working with early MR platform tech
  Integrating and validating against beta mixed reality SDKs and changing requirements, including periods where I did not have access to the final hardware.

• Systems R&D to support the designed MR gameplay
  Prototyping and hardening the technical building blocks needed to make “zombies in your room” feel convincing.

• Incremental delivery under event deadlines
  Producing regular internal test builds, plus milestone builds for major industry events like the Game Developers Conference and Gamescom.

• In-game tools for faster iteration
  Building practical debug and test tooling so designers, artists, and QA could validate MR behaviour quickly, tune scenarios, and reproduce edge cases without developer hand-holding.

The result was a mixed reality mode that landed well with players and reviewers, and it remains a standout example of how MR can feel intense, physical, and surprisingly “real” when it fully commits to your space as the battlefield.

To date, this has been the greatest mixed reality project I've had the privilege to work on. Great team. Great game!