Shardfall / Shardfall: FitQuest VR
- Cordelia Chui
- Jan 13
- 2 min read
Updated: Feb 27
Quell, 2024 / 2025
Real fitness. Real gaming. Dive into epic adventures and torch more calories than a spin class. Get fired up, start gaming, and crush your fitness goals.
Visit the official website here
Developed and published by Quell as a launch title for the Quell Impact (bespoke hardware). Ported to Meta Quest VR.
Individual Contribution
I worked on Shardfall from six months until release, continuing into live service with 6 post-release updates. I had ownership of many different features and various content throughout the game, in addition to being the design lead on a cabinet mode demo build for on-site PR sessions and a Selfridges store booth.
Deliveries
4 new enemy types
75+ enemy variants (including tutorial enemies and bosses)
16 procedurally-generated levels
Cabinet mode demo
Responsibilities
As a generalist designer at Quell, my specialism was in AI behaviour and encounter design, but my work spanned across procedural content distribution, FTUE systems and level design, metagame systems and UI/UX.
Prototyping, iterative design and final implementation of NPCs using AI tooling in Unity 3D, including new enemy types and variants:
Behaviour trees
Node graphs
Animator controllers
Mesh, materials, blendshapes and VFX hookups
Messaging (VFX, UI and audio)
Distribution of enemies, environments and tutorials across all campaign levels in the game with consideration for roguelike progression and replayability.
Base enemy types
Enemy variants
Biome and sub-biomes
Tutorial pop-ups
Designed and built 16 procedurally-generated levels with adaptive encounters and traversal sections using dynamic difficulty adjustment and probabilistic systems.
Serving enemy types and levels using game performance and fitness metrics
Session flow and level design using timers, weighted and conditional events
Controlled randomness between concurrent sessions to incentivise replayability
Hand placed details for enjoyable surprises
Rulesets to bring enemies and biomes in harmony with theme and narrative
Gamewide balancing of player, enemies and metagame systems:
Behaviours including base and special abilities
Stats
Scaling
Difficulty modifiers
Game score
Player performance
Reward economy
Created GDDs for multidisciplinary teams including mockups, wireframes, flow diagrams, technical and art requirements, future scalability and feature scoping.
Initial design of metagame systems such as new game plus, challenges, cosmetics, loot boxes and UI/UX design for equipment screens and menu navigation.
Created and maintained technical documentation of design tools.
Defined requirements of design tool requests for AI, level generation and reward systems.
Design and implementation of FTUE
Session flow, pacing and level design
Tutorialised NPCs
Absolutely and conditionally triggered UI elements
Conducted playtests and used telemetric data to gain feedback and identify issues.
Led group brainstorms, workshops and problem solving meetings.
Working closely with all other disciplines including production, game engineers, machine learning engineers, technical art, character art, environment art, animation, VFX, audio and marketing.
