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