Badlands Crew News

Hello Crewmates!

We’re super excited to announce a Badlands Crew Demo will officially be heading to Steam’s Next Fest this February, with the full game releasing in Spring 2025!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3402770/Badlands_Crew_Demo

Buckle up, and start revving those engines, because next month you’ll be able to experience the latest evolution in the Crew series Here’s what to expect in the demo during Next Fest...

[h3]UNLEASH YOUR CREATIVITY[/h3]
You’ll be able to dive into the all-new vehicle customisation and get your creative juices flowing as you build an awesome Battle Wagon worthy of dominating death-defying enemy factions.



[h3]ASSEMBLE YOUR CREW[/h3]
Get an early look at the dynamic roles, skills and abilities of your crew, and start to discover worthy combinations that are sure to bring success on your ventures throughout the Badlands.



[h3]HIGH-OCTANE COMBAT[/h3]
Get hands-on with the advanced combat system; steer your beast of a Battle Wagon freely across the desert while you navigate your crew meticulously in high-octane battles against enemy vehicles. Multitasking under pressure will be key to your journey, where quick thinking and strategy are your ultimate weapons!



[h3]EXPLORE THE CITADEL[/h3]
Take some time out to listen to the resident Citadel band, The Wingnuts. Admire your late Crew’s valiant efforts at the shrine and recruit new members to adventure the Badlands with. Furthermore, you can upgrade your Crew members' gear and abilities and customise your Wagon with your acquired resources. The Citadel is a haven for you to get creative and develop your strategies ahead of selecting your next mission.



If you’re already familiar with both Bomber Crew and Space Crew, we’re confident you’re going to have blast during Next Fest exploring the Badlands. Mark your calendars now and prepare to lead your crew to glory during Next Fest.

Thanks for the support, we really appreciate you checking out Badlands and we hope you’re excited for the demo. Make sure to wishlist the game today to make sure you’re one of the first people to find out when the demo is live and when the full game is released later this year!

Jon, Dave, Joe & Greg.

Hello!
Dave from Runner Duck here - I wanted to make some quick posts to share some details about the enemy factions you’ll face on the road in Badlands Crew. This time, ‘The Vultures’.

Badlands Crew is set in a future after the world has suffered a perfect storm of global catastrophes, leaving civilisation, culture and technology almost completely wiped clean. Humanity's survivors are left fractured and in disarray. In the vacuum of order the very worst of humanity rose to seize positions of power, preying on the people’s fear. The most ruthless and twisted became the fearsome Warlords, who terrorise the Badlands from their fortified Outposts and Strongholds.

Eventually, almost every survivor ended up captive in one of the Warlords’ gulag-like Strongholds; forced to scavenge and serve.Those who readily gave in to their greed and hatred were promoted by the Warlords to be their road warriors, irredeemably devoted to chaos and war.

If you stray into the more mountainous regions of the Badlands, you’ll be met by The Vultures, a faction that patrols the slopes, looking for the weak and vulnerable to swoop on and pick clean.

A Vulture Patrol scours the moon-lit mountainside for easy pickings

The Vultures are commanded by Lord Griffon - a deeply greedy man who keeps tight control of food production in his Strongholds, gorging himself and leaving only scraps to be distributed among his many subjects.

Early Concept Art for the Vulture Faction’s Warlord, Symbol and crew characters

We wanted to give each faction a distinct flavour, so decided to limit the era of vehicle they use to a single decade. In the case of The Vultures, they favour cars and trucks from the 1950s.

A selection of Vulture Vehicles, tooled up with Scrap Cannons and Blade Launchers

When it came to the Vulture’s armaments, we designed sets of blade launchers and scrap cannons. It seemed fitting that this faction would employ weapons that slash and tear.
L-R: A makeshift blade launcher constructed of a tin can and angle-grinder; A dual repeating scrap cannon, made from a pair of oil cans and a spring-loaded reloading mechanism; A Legendary multi-blade launcher, powered by a hefty electric motor.

I hope this brief glimpse begins to give a sense of the world we’ve been creating. I’ll continue to share more when I get a chance as we finish up the game!

Cheers!
Dave

Hi! Dave from Runner Duck here again to share a quick tidbit on one of the enemy factions in Badlands Crew - ‘The Pyros’.

As you make your way through the Badlands, you’ll need to capture enemy outposts and strongholds along the way, to extend your reach across the wastes. In order to do this, you must vanquish the forces of the Warlords that hold them. Each faction employs different weapon types, which can be crafted and installed on your own Battle Wagon once their blueprints have been found!

Beyond the mountainous region ruled by Lord Griffon’s Vultures, you’ll come across regions of smoke and fumes, territories held by The Pyros.

A Pyro Heavy Gunship patrols the Lava Flows

Commanded by Chief Dante, they believe that there is nothing left of worth in the world - the only path forward is to cleanse everything with flame, and enjoy watching it burn.

Early Concept Art for the Pyro Faction’s Warlord, Symbol and crew characters

When it comes to vehicles, the Pyro’s decade of choice is the 1930s. In addition to huge, heavy old firetrucks, they have fleets of Ratrods, cut down to the basics and used as agile assault units.

Pyro vehicles in our ‘Virtual Parking Lot’ scene, where we assemble the many variations

Of course, the Pyros are armed to the teeth with incendiary weapons. These vary from close-range flamers, to longer-range flame lances and fireball cannons.
L-R: A makeshift flamer cobbled together from an aerosol can and lighter; A dual fireball launcher made from old water bottles; A fearsome high-octane, wide-spread acetylene torch

That’s all for now, plenty of work still to do!
Catch you next time!
Dave

Hello! I’m Jon from Runner Duck, and I’m writing the Development Update this time.

The Citadel is the main base of the player’s faction, a sanctuary, relatively safe from the dangers of the Badlands around it. The player will spend a fair amount of time in the Citadel, equipping their crew and building their vehicle, so it was important to us to make it a vibrant, lively and interesting place. Missions out in the Badlands can be brutal and tense, so allowing the player to return to an oasis of relative comfort and humanity between missions is important for balance. With these things in mind, we came up with the idea of the Citadel Band, “The Wingnuts”.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Unlike the rock soundtrack of the missions, The Wingnuts play cheerful folk and skiffle influenced music. I reached out to a musician I knew in Brighton, who performs with a number of bands in a range of styles, who I thought would be perfect for this soundtrack. He wrote the songs, and put together a small group to perform and record them. The songs were so good that we soon realised we would have to step up our presentation of the band within the game in order to do them justice!

The real life musicians behind “The Wingnuts”

I have always found that when there are musicians animated in a game (or cartoon), it really adds to the sense of immersion if their animation closely matches the music they are actually playing. We were using a MIDI data import system to drive the drumming animation of crewmates in War Drums stations, so I extended this system to allow us to animate The Wingnuts.

[h2]MIDI DATA TRACKS[/h2]
All of the music for The Wingnuts was performed live, so it did not have any pre-existing MIDI data to work from. - however, it was recorded along to a click track, so it is not too tricky for me to create ‘silent MIDI tracks’ which mimic what is being played by the actual musicians. For this, I use Ableton Live:

‘Silent’ MIDI tracks matched to live performance audio in Ableton Live

One MIDI track is created per instrument. The guitar MIDI track is the most complex, as it has both the pitch of the note (which affects the fretboard hand’s position) and has midi notes which trigger different animations for picking up, picking down, big strums up, and big strums down. There is an additional MIDI track for voice and harmonica, which animates the band’s mouths. I create these tracks by ear, listening to the song and adding notes as appropriate. Authoring a full set of silent MIDI data for a track generally takes me around an hour.

Once finished, I save out the .mid files, and our code in Unity converts them into a list of animation events.

[h2]CHARACTER ANIMATION[/h2]
Characters were first given base ‘groove’ animation loops, making them nod and bob along with the music - we take the beats per minute of the current track and use this to modify the speed of this animation so they all stay in time with the music.

To make the characters appear to be playing the correct pitch on their instruments, we created a set of animations in which their ‘fretting’ hands were placed at a certain position to play a certain pitch; we took these sets of pitch animations and assigned them to a Blend Tree; a feature of game engine animation systems which allows us to blend their motion together using a simple value input from the pitch tracks of the MIDI data.

We then layer animations for the instrument playing/plucking hands on top of this, along with some incidental variations of the base ‘groove’ animations and there we have it - fully animated musicians!

Adjusting the bass player’s ‘pitch’ blend tree live in the editor

The animation state machine for the guitarist’s strumming arm

[h2]FINISHING TOUCHES...[/h2]
There are some other elements, outside of the animation which we had to consider. The band is placed on stage in the Citadel, so to sound natural, the music should sound as if it is coming from there. However, it can quickly become annoying if the music is only coming from one side while you are working on your vehicle (especially with headphones)! To address this, we use a dynamic spatial blend. When the camera moves or changes, we begin to blend towards the music being spatialised (so the position and direction of the band is taken into account). After a short while of the camera being in a new location, we blend away from the music being spatialised, to just being a standard stereo stream. We also combine this with some reverb and filtering, so that when the camera is far from the band, the music is less clear and contains the natural reverb you would expect from the cavernous space between the walls of the Citadel.

We’ve been listening to The Wingnuts play on in the background of the Citadel as we work developing the game; despite hearing the same set of tracks for hundreds if not thousands of hours, we haven’t got sick of it at all - in fact we find ourselves whistling the tunes when going about our lives outside of work! Testament to what an incredible job the real musicians did when writing and recording the music!

A soothing bedtime ballad

Thanks for reading this far. I hope you enjoyed this small insight into our game!
Jon

Hello! Dave from Runner Duck here.

It’s been a while since I posted anything here, so it felt like time to give you all a quick update!
Since releasing Bomber Crew, Runner Duck has doubled in size - there’s now 4 of us!

Badlands Crew is by far our most ambitious project yet, the scale of the world being one of the main challenges for our little team.

I wanted to share a glimpse of one of the first of the 12 regions that will confront you in the game – The Lower Badlands.


Captain Ironside Briefs a Crew on their next task in defense of the Citadel

This region is a dusty, eroded desert, scored with deep canyons that you’ll need to traverse to reach the stronghold of the reigning Warlord, Major Krank. His faction, the Gun Nutz, will be patrolling the rust coloured sands with their arsenal of salvaged military vehicles and firearms, ready to reduce your Battle Wagon to scrap.

Your Battle Wagon’s fuel tanks are not bottomless, so good navigation is key, as the region is prone to sandstorms that will make it harder to keep your bearings!

A Battle Wagon rumbles down towards the Lower Badlands from Home Plateau

The size of this one region is around 50 square km, and the entire world covers approximately 722 square km!

One challenge of building a world so large is generating navigation data for the player and enemy drivers to be able to negotiate their way around and plan routes efficiently. Jon solved this by creating a solution that looks at the various colliders in the world and bakes out a grid that the driver behaviors can use to quickly look up where the accessible areas are. Where more definition is required, each grid square will divide itself into 4 smaller squares. This structure is known as a Quadtree.

Every time a change is made to the layout of the world, the entire quadtree must be re-baked, which takes around 1 hour 15 minutes and results in about 350mb of navigation data on disk; We have a process running on a spare PC that automates this - minimising the disruption to our workflow.

Editor view of the baked Quadtree Navigation data

When creating the world, I first block out the driveable surfaces using Unity’s Terrain tools, quickly defining the elevations, slopes and obstacle rock outcrops. Once that’s done, we can place spawners for enemy units, and start testing out missions in that area. When we’re happy with the layout, I do a pass of placing rock geometry to get the landscape looking the part. After that, it's a case of iterating and adding various smaller details, like ruined structures, cacti, destructible rock piles etc…

Before and after lining the driveable areas of the region with rock geometry

We have a global day/night system that includes fog effects which can be overridden to set the right mood for each region. Below is a shot I took of the Lower Badlands at sunrise, during which a wild Sandworm just happened to make a surprise appearance - clever girl!

Sunrise over Calamity Canyon in the Lower Badlands towards Smokestack Stronghold

If you’re interested in posts that are a bit more techy and dev insight focused, please let us know - we’ll try to do some more when we get a spare moment.

OK, I’ve got to get back to the project now - thanks for reading!

Dave
Runner Duck