Kayak VR: Mirage news & patch notes

We just released a new patch for the game! This one mostly addresses some issues introduced by our multiplayer patch. Users who were missing the beach ball as well as those who were missing the ability to turn off the camera moving with the kayak can finally rejoice! We’ve also improved the smoothed turning of the camera with the kayak option, so maybe give that a try if you have a tendency to get motion sickness. This patch also prepares us for the upcoming DLC environment so stay tuned as it's right around the corner :) Kayak VR: Mirage

• Fixed broken tutorials
• Fixed turning off rotate camera with kayak setting in accessibility
• Improved the smooth turning of camera with kayak
• Fixed race HUDs occasionally not appearing
• Fixed sting ray and manta ray behavior
• Fixed overly bright birds in Costa Rica at night
• Fixed whale not having proper animations
• Fixed crab behavior
• Fixed dog not properly barking at players

Soča Valley

• Fixed bear no longer protecting its cubs

Development on it started over a year ago and as it turns out, making a VR game with a character, holding a paddle, in a kayak, all physics based, work in multiplayer is no joke. However we think it's completely worth it as we've had a blast during our testing and can’t wait to hear what you think! We’re still collecting feedback on the mode so the #multiplayer channel on our Discord (https://kayakvr.com/discord) is at your disposal to share your thoughts and moments in multiplayer!

Kayak VR: Mirage

• Fixed friends not showing up on leaderboards properly
• Fixed text-encoding of game, vehicle and location parameters of telemetry output

Soča Valley

• Fix eagle sounds playing too often and too loud

We’re thrilled to share our fifth location: the Soča Valley in Slovenia! We’ve listened to your feedback and included whitewater rapids which are a blast to navigate through. And for the folks who come to the game to relax, there’s plenty of tranquil exploring to do as this is our largest and most graphically impressive environment to date. Making the game work with this new whitewater system was no small feat but we’d love to hear what you think (kayakvr.com/discord) and if you’d like to see it incorporated into future environments. We’ve also added upper-body IK to the game so no more floating paddles! 🎉I’d encourage you to check it out in race mode as the ghosts now all include characters too. It really enhances the immersion and after having it in the game it’s hard to imagine it wasn’t always there. This feature might also provide a clue as to what else we’re working on… 👀 Besides the big stuff we’ve also been fixing small bugs and improving things we came across along the way. If you notice the game looking a little sharper on PSVR2 that’s because we found some optimizations along the way 🙂 In other exciting news, we’ll be joining the PS+ Premium Catalogue next week so if you’re a subscriber and haven’t had the opportunity to check the game out this is a great time! If you want some insight into how we’re doing, here’s a little summary of how Soča Valley came to be and why it took longer than we’d anticipated: When we first started off we wanted something that would incorporate feedback from our roadmap and would blow you away. This led us to whitewater, which our current water system could not do in a satisfying way. So we had to switch to a new water system with all the complications that it brings to the physics, visuals etc. We were also expanding the scope and scale multiple times when we thought of cool new things to add. But then performance issues would rear their ugly head and we’d have to keep adjusting, tweaking and refining. We hope you can see the work and love that went into Soča Valley as we tried to be as ambitious as possible. We promise you won’t have to wait as long for a future update as we have more in the pipeline that we hope to show in the next few months!

It’s been about a week since we launched our first DLC: Soča Valley. Overall it seems like people are enjoying the rapids and a new huge environment! Special shoutout to all of you who’ve shared your feedback on Discord, Steam etc. However we have some things to improve on, mainly our communication with y’all. Hopefully you’ll consider this post a solid step in improving that. For anyone who just wants to read the patch notes, you can find them at the bottom. First off, we wanted to surprise and excite you with the Soča Valley announcement but in the future we’ll make sure to better communicate what to expect leading up to the announcement (type of content, pricing, release date). We’ve also alluded to this in the past but in order to be more transparent we’d like to announce that we’re working on multiplayer and have been for a while! This was our most requested feature and also the most challenging one, that’s why it’s been taking longer than we expected. Ideally we’d have shipped this as a big free update next to the DLC but unfortunately we couldn’t make that happen and didn’t want to hold back the DLC when it’s done and ready to go. We can’t give you a firm release date yet but we’ll try and keep you posted on our progress. This will be 2 player multiplayer with both players in their own kayak, at least for now, as adding more players will complicate things significantly and you’ve been waiting for a while 😉 We’re also in the early stages of development of another DLC environment! I Not much to share beyond that but it’s shaping up nicely and we look forward to showing it off in the future. We’re also taking a critical look at our roadmap, its initial goal for us was mainly to collect feedback on ideas we had but it hasn’t provided much information to the community. We’d like to change that by reworking the roadmap to be more transparent and clear on what we’re working on. In the meantime keep sharing what you’d like to see as that’s still valuable information to us! Kayak VR: Mirage

• Added the option to turn off the new Upper Body feature (found under general settings)
• Added experimental support for telemetry, looking forward to seeing this in action!
• Fixed night sky in Costa Rica being too bright
• Fixed players being able to go out of bounds
• Fixed "spot the" achievements not unlocking
• Fixed penguins behavior in Antarctica
• Fixed missing start positions for Costa Rica in tour mode

Soča Valley

• Tweaked LODs to reduce noticeable popping and increase visual quality
• Tweaked daytime exposure to brighten up some dark areas
• Fixed Tour mode routes getting stuck in some instances
• Added more fishes
• Fixed crowd near the town not always clapping
• Lowered the amount of birds high in the sky

It’s nearly Christmas time again and our holiday themed make-over of Kings Canyon is back! Whether this is your first time getting to play it, or if it's familiar to you, we hope you enjoy :) It wouldn’t be right to post this without addressing the elephant in the room: where are the new features/content? If you want some insight into what’s been happening behind the scenes, here’s a little breakdown of our experience post-launch. As serene and chill as the game itself is, the development of any game is really stressful, and ours was no exception. Getting Kayak VR to the finish line - first in July last year, and then again in February with the launch of the PSVR2 - was really magic and rewarding, but it also took its toll on the three of us. As much as we wanted to keep firing through at the same speed we had been, we are at the core still very mortal. We’ve gotten things mostly back on the rails now, but this year has not been as productive as we would have liked it to be. In our enthusiasm to make the game better we spread ourselves thin trying to (unsuccessfully, for now) port the game to Unreal Engine 5, work on your most requested features from the roadmap and a new environment. Thank you for all your support and feedback, it has not gone unnoticed and we’re working our butts off to reward that support and patience!

Kayak VR: Mirage is now live on PS VR2! It’s a great version of the game with features exclusive to the PSVR2 such as specially designed haptics and foveated rendering. While working on the PSVR2 version we made plenty of tweaks to the game over time that will also benefit PC players. https://kayakvr.com/images/gifs/tour_mode.gif Here’s a list of tweaks we made along the way: - A brand new controller-free tour mode where the kayak moves for you. - Improved stick mode tracking, especially for inside-out tracking headsets like the Quest - Added the option to start at the beach or the jungle when playing in Costa Rica - Added an exposure slider for night time variants that allow you to set the exposure to your liking, this can be found in general settings - We’ve made the decision to remove simulation mode for now. We noticed very few users were using it and with an eye on the future it’s hard to maintain. Depending on feedback we might bring this back Minor fixes: - Cleaned up many minor visual flaws in Kings Canyon - Improved performance of fish schools and other sealife - Improved sound design in Norway and Antarctica - Improved consistency and fidelity of kayak and paddle collision sounds - Fixed a bug where paddle scraping sounds would disappear entirely after hitting certain objects - Ambience in Kings Canyon and Costa Rica should now loop correctly - Added a collision sound to hitting your head - Improved fish animations - Retweaked exposure at night time to generally be brighter We’ve had to spend the last few months mostly working on the Playstation version but now that it’s released we’ll have more time to spend on new stuff!

We’ve always been suckers for Christmas themed content in games so we wanted to give our Australia environment a Christmas make-over. Players who were a part of our beta a year ago might remember this but we hope this is a fun surprise for all new Kayak VR: Mirage players. This special version will only be playable until January 6th so make sure to check it out before then and unlock a Santa Hat in our Sea Miles shop. We’re also hosting a Christmas tournament this year! If you fancy yourself a Max Verstappen on the water make sure to participate by putting down a solid leaderboard time on the Downstream track in the Christmas weather condition (deadline is January 6th @ 12PM GMT). The top 3 spots take home $100, $50 and $20 in Steam Gift cards respectively so you can put that money towards other dope games. And finally, we’re also taking part in the Steam Winter Sale so if you’ve been holding off on buying the game it’s a steal now at 30% off! Or give the gift of virtual kayaking by buying it for a friend and spread some holiday cheer ;) Happy holidays!

If you enjoyed the game it would be amazing if you’d consider voting for us in the VR Game of the Year category! We’re up against some big boys but everyone loves a good underdog story, right? If it helps motivate you to vote at all, we’re preparing a Christmas gift! King’s Canyon will receive a make-over and get the complete Christmas treatment, with none other than Santa himself racing you. Stay tuned for this later on in the year.

It’s been a while since our last update but we are most certainly not dead! Although, admittedly after our first patch to stabilize the game we’ve taken a little time to breathe. We have a small update this time, mostly focused on future proofing the game a bit more on our back-end. We’re also working on a version of the game for VR arcades with some cool features, hopefully you’ll see the game in local VR arcades sometime next month. More exciting updates are a little further out but on the horizon! - We updated some textures in King’s Canyon from 4k to 8k. If your texture settings are set to cinematic you should see a nice little boost in sharpness. - You can now use the shop anywhere, no more going to the pool just to check out your new kayak skin. - A crash reporter has been added to the game so it’s possible to send us logs of the crash with the press of a button. We’re pretty content with the overall stability of the game but these reports might help us track down some nasty bugs / crashes in the future as well. As a small note, it might seem like the report is being sent to Epic but it’s actually going to us. We might give the crash reporter a fresh coat of paint in the future to distinguish it a little more. - Some text was getting cut off during the tutorial in certain languages, this should be fixed now. - Fixed an edge-case where the on-screen menu could get culled if your headset was not looking at the in-game menu. -We’ve made some changes to our back-end, related to leaderboard scores. If you notice any issues like your times not being uploaded please let us know. - More tweaks to the German, Korean and Japanese localization. Thank you to @ReadyPlayer0815 for helping out with some changes to the German one. We’ve reverted the Korean localization as it seems our old one was actually better, thank you @biluderen. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/40876185/b4329ed3ca3a6180e7b3c139bd83c2d3320e512d.png

We've just made our first significant update, and although it's mostly a laundry list of small tweaks and bugfixes we wanted to put something fun in there too. That's why we added this inflatable goal that you can unlock. Once we add real-time multiplayer we'll definitely revisit this and flesh it out a bit more but for now you can practice your shots in the pool ;) https://kayakvr.com/images/gifs/goal.gif Here's the full changelog of the patch for those interested, it addresses some common feedback like an improved tutorial, increased sharpness, improved bird speed / behavior:

• Added an inflatable goal to the Sea Miles shop
• Added a lesson that explains how to turn the kayak by leaning to the left or right
• Added a lesson that explains how to make sharp turns when the kayak has speed by holding the paddle in the water
• Added a ghost kayak to the lessons that demonstrates the technique of the lesson
• Added the option to enable Texture Streaming under advanced graphics in the menu. This could fix (out of memory) crashes and reduce loading times but might introduce hitches.
• Improved seagull behavior and speed in Antarctic and Norway
• Reworked a few of the kayak / paddle friction sounds
• Added a safe mode that sets all graphical settings to low, this should be used if you accidentally tweaked your settings to the point that the game is not stable enough to revert back through the regular menu. To utilize this add `-safe` as launch parameter to the game in Steam. Don't forget to remove it once you've reset it or the settings will keep getting reverted.
• Added some experimental support for launch options to force SteamVR or the Oculus SDK to run. If you want to force the Oculus SDK use `-hmd=OculusHMD` (or if that doesn’t work – and please let us know if that is the case – `-hmd=Oculus`). If you want to force SteamVR use `-hmd=SteamVR`. You can add the launch options under Kayak VR: Mirage > Properties > General > Launch Options in Steam.
• Tweaked sharpness to improve clarity when default Anti-Aliasing is enabled
• Exposed a sharpness slider for FidelityFX’s own sharpening solution (Contrast Adaptive Sharpening).
• You can now choose to race against the top 5 times on any level
• You can now adjust the haptic intensity under general settings
• Added more fish schools and dolphins in Costa Rica
• Restarting after finishing a race is now equally fast to restarting during a race

Minor fixes:

• Fixed leaderboards not always showing up after a race
• Added a splash sound to the penguin jumping in the water in the Antarctic
• Fixed paddle water splashes being too bright in night time levels
• Fixed the magical flying turtle in Costa Rica
• Fixed the vignette option not staying on, even when 'always on' was selected
• Fixed strange reflection edges out in the sea in Norway
• Fixed falling off the map at the edges in Norway
• No more continuing collision sounds when pushing off against objects
• Improved the strange strobing effect on water in Antarctic
• Improved sound design in Antarctic
• Ambient sound now properly loops in Antarctic
• Fixed a few missing translations
• Fixed missing collision on rock in Norway
• Fixed mistake in the lessons where the reverse turn lessons were...reversed
• Reduced the amount of time required to unlock the thalassophobia achievement
• Added an extra trigger on the other side of the jungle for the Turtle rescue
• FidelityFX and DLSS can no longer be on at the same time
• Added an icon for desktop shortcuts

We just pushed our first very small patch which mainly fixes some mistakes in translation and some visuals in the Costa Rica level. Don't worry, we'll be tackling many more of the bugs and feedback we've gotten over the past few days in future updates! - Added professional translations for Chinese, Korean and Japanese, we expect these to be a lot better than our previous translations but if you see things you think are wrong please keep letting us know in the translations channel on Discord. - Fixed up some wonky translations in German, thank you to @thunfischbaum @ReadyPlayer0815 and @Tino for your help with the german translations. - Fixed up some minor visual mistakes in the Costa Rica level (this ballooned the filesize of the update a bit, sorry!) - There's now a way to select languages when starting up the game outside of Steam. Although we still recommend launching the game through Steam to make sure you can get achievements, correct username in leaderboards and the correct language.