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!
