Badlands Crew News

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

Hi Crewmates!

Sharing the latest Badlands news and a development update for you from Runner Duck towers.
Firstly, we’re taking part in the upcoming Tiny Teams event on Steam! This is a massive opportunity for a small team like us, to be featured alongside some of the best indie devs out there. We're thrilled that all the hard work that we’re putting into Badlands Crew has been recognised by the Yogscast. Make sure you check out the Yogscast’s streams, you might catch some Badlands Crew gameplay among some other fantastic games made by some great Tiny Teams!

Badlands Crew is our most ambitious project ever. At this point, there’s thousands of different ways to customise both your crew and your wagon. We’re going to go out on a limb and say that Badlands Crew will be our most rewarding game to date – we’ve been working hard to make sure that you will have a deeper and more involved experience of progression throughout your playthrough, more than any other Crew game.

At the beginning of Badlands Crew, your gunners will start out with your trusty Junk Lobber (it gets the job done), but by the end of Badlands Crew, you’ll have engaged in battles employing flamethrowers, buzz saw railguns, toxic gas launchers and more.
You’ll also see your wagon evolve over time, starting off as a rudimentary single-trailer rig before you unlock larger trailers and the option to attach up to three trailers to your wagon. Over time, you’ll build a customisable behemoth that will leave the Warlords of the Badlands quaking in their boots.
Badlands Crew also has a wide variety of missions for you to complete. Whether you're racing against the elusive nomad, 'Gekko’, clearing areas of marauding enemy war bands, rescuing captive survivors, stomping out juvenile sandworms (and running from bigger adults!) or capturing outposts and strongholds – The Badlands will keep you on your toes.
That’s all before we get into our all new stat and perk system, which will open up endless possibilities to fine tune your crew builds.

We can’t wait for you to get your hands on Badlands Crew. As a small team of four, delivering new features, systems, tech and content at this scale means that we need to take the necessary time to deliver you the best game we can make, and so we will now be releasing Badlands Crew in 2025.

Thank you for all of the support that you have given us over the years, it means the world to us.
We’ll have more updates to share with you soon!
Sincerely,

Dave, Greg, Joe, and Jon
The Runner Duck Team.

We love sim games, you love sim games so why not celebrate the very best with our friends and partners Stray Fawn Studio, Future Friends and Fireshine Games!

From building rigs to assembling the best team, the deep strategic thinking will make Badlands Crew the greatest and deepest Crew game yet.

Join us in our Discord to pick up the conversation