Badlands Crew -Cartoony vehicular combat

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

This is from developers of Bomber Crew and Space Crew.

As a protector of The Citadel, the last outpost of the surviving innocents, you must journey into the lawless Badlands to conquer crazed factions of marauders and defeat their evil chief, The Orator. To succeed you must construct and customize your ferocious battle wagon to adapt to the lethal threats you will face.

Use deep and dynamic vehicle customization to equip your wagon with a range of components and weapons such as flamethrowers, sniper turrets, gatling guns, lookout towers, medical stations, wheels, suspension, fuel tanks, engines and exhausts. Build your battle wagon, your way…




Transform a rag-tag crew of skill-less grunts into a legendary unit of elite road warriors with abilities that complement your battle wagon’s strengths and your playstyle. Life expectancy out in the Badlands is short and death is permanent – only hardened warriors will thrive. Choose wisely who to put in danger!




Combat requires commanders to multitask under immense pressure. Think quickly on your feet and manage your crew individually in the heat of battle to man guns, repair vehicle components, heal injured crew mates and repel boarders. Drive and navigate to avoid environmental hazards such as sandstorms, volcanic eruptions and giant sandworms whilst fighting off waves of enemy combatants.




The Gun Nutz, Pyros, Vultures and Klowns are the savage militia groups that roam the Badlands, each led by a crazed Warlord boss. Going head-to-head to defeat them in combat will require skill and planning as each faction has their own unique weaponry and combat tactics. You will need to adapt your strategies, your battle wagon build and your crew’s skills to succeed!




The Badlands is a vast desert landscape, filled with strongholds and outposts to overcome on your journey. Your decisions change the campaign map as faction influence declines and grows based on the outcome of your battles. Smart decision-making within the safety of The Citadel when planning routes, customizing vehicles and training your crew is just as important as critical calls made during the heat of battle.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2078230/view/3646280646054962587

Buckle up – We’re in Strategy Fest!
A deeper look at strategic playstyles in Badlands Crew

Strategic and tactical decision-making are key cornerstones in the Crew game series. No two playthroughs are ever the same, as every strategic choice you make, large or small, will shape your playthrough and decide the fate of your crew. In Badlands Crew, these decisions will have a more significant impact than in Bomber Crew and Space Crew, so it’s more important than ever that you make the right choices at the right time.

Each of your playthroughs will unravel the story of a unique crew, recruited and trained specifically by you to have a unique set of skills, while operating a custom-built battle wagon, specially crafted by you, detailed with bespoke weaponry and tactical enhancements that will enable you to establish your legend throughout the Badlands.

Let’s take a look at how smart (and poor...) decision-making will impact your chances of survival!


Choose Your Path via the Dynamic Campaign Map

For the first time in the Crew game series, Badlands Crew presents players a dynamic, living map, populated by active enemy factions and strongholds. Your mission is simple – set off from the safe-haven of the Citadel in the West, traversing across the wild and dangerous Badlands to the East to take on the ultimate warlord ‘The Orator’. You must subvert his dastardly goal of taking command of the four crazed cult-like enemy factions that occupy strongholds across Badlands. If The Orator succeeds, he will destroy what little hope remains for humanity’s survival...

It’s all up to you. How you decide to plot your route will have a significant impact on the world around you.

Capturing strongholds from controlling warlord factions directly impacts their influence on the map, reducing enemy patrols and skirmishes, enabling you to move and operate more freely.

Alternatively, leaving them unchallenged will allow them to grow stronger and wreak more havoc. As you continually traverse the Badlands, it is therefore up to you to strategically weigh up the cost and benefit of putting your crew and battle wagon at risk to engage in combat.


Strategically Train Your Crew - Jacks-of-all-trades or elite specialists?

As another first-time feature in the Crew game series, crew members are no longer limited to having fixed primary roles. Instead, crew members can now be dynamically trained to have multiple
Skills
and
Perks
– all depending on how you tactically and creatively approach shaping your team’s specialties.

Intricately tailoring your crew will enable you to test new offensive or defensive approaches by strategically leveling your crew members across the range of skills:
Vitality, Strength, Agility, Driving, Weapons, Engineering, Leadership
, and
Wastelander
. As you increase your crew’s skill ranks, they will automatically unlock special
Perks
that will further enhance their capabilities.

For example, a crew member with a significantly high
Vitality
skill will unlock a perk that allows them to revive themselves instantly after being incapacitated.

Are you one to hedge your bets and train all of your crewmates’ skills evenly, so if your driver perishes in combat, your front gunner could swiftly take the wheel? A crew with broad yet average-level skills may seem less optimal, yet a team of 9 specialists capable of handling any challenge thrown at them would be an adaptable team able to survive the unpredictable and hostile environment.

On the other hand, focusing fully on a more headstrong approach with a crew of intimidating specialists also has significant benefits – for example, having a gunner solely focused on their unmatched
Weapons
skill with dead-eye precision will greatly improve your performance in combat. Paired with a driver with all of their Skill Points thrown into the
Driving
skill, and you have a battle wagon capable of attacking, defending and outmaneuvering your opponents, although any casualties in the heat of battle could be devastating for the survivability of your entire crew.


Tactical Battle Wagon Construction

For the first time in the crew series, you will be able to build and customize your vehicle, creating the ultimate harbinger of speed and destruction. Your battle wagon build will directly determine how capable you are of completing your campaign’s strategic objectives.

Shape your vehicle to be lean and lightweight with a powerful engine for more agile handling, or go heavy and steady with stacks of armor and bulky weapon stations, such as an unforgiving range of gatling guns, scrap cannons and flamethrowers.

The garage will be the center of your engineering excellence, providing you with a workshop in which to build your battle wagon from a wide and evolving range of vehicle components, such as shields, weapon and defense stations, engines, cabs, trailers, wheels, building blocks, ladders and bridges, as well as the always-essential battle decals, decorations and more.

The vehicle-building system in Badlands Crew now gives you more hands-on control in the designing stage of your battle wagon, with ability to position, rotate and edit items live onto your build. You can even extend the size of your battle wagon with additional trailers, which could help to increase your firepower, or provide space for a life-saving medical station. Either way, you can build your way to meet your campaign objectives.

The garage also contains a decal station where you’ll be able to get creative with the cosmetic decoration of your battle wagon – with options ranging from a free-hand painting tool, to a sticker library, the ability to import custom images, and more.

Badlands Crew will force you to make strategic and tactical decisions at every turn – from crew and battle wagon development in the safety of the Citadel, to the path you choose and missions you seek to complete throughout the Badlands, and the way you command your crew and make game-changing calls in the heat of battle. Life or death, and success or failure relies on the quality of your decision-making, Commander!

Stay tuned for more updates by following and wishlisting Badlands Crew. We’ll see you again soon for more updates!

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2078230/view/4346622097163595028

Summer Development Update
A Development update from the Studio
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

 

[The Decline]

Art style is complete dogshit. Pass.

 

[Reality]

I was hoping for a new twisted metal or at least cel damage type game from the title

 

[luj1]

Old games made for kids seem more mature than games made for adults today.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2078230/view/4515514058306224176

Development Update – The World of the Badlands
Early-Game Region: The Lower Badlands
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