Pawel Pruszynski

Level Design portfolio

The Final Prologue

general

For this DLC I had full ownership of level design and the horror aspect of the game — translating the main story into horror elements and distributing them across the level.
In this DLC we follow the character of a film director — as in previous parts there is a chapter division. Each chapter relates to a specific horror subgenre — the first to classic/Hitchcockian horror, the second to slasher, and the third to cosmic horror. Therefore all horror events needed to be appropriate to the genre.

Structure

Office — the place where the chapter starts
Thought corridor — a tangle of corridors after leaving the office, meant to symbolize the director’s thought process — closed paths = cut ideas, a kind of internal dialogue represented in space
Studio corridors — studios connecting movie sets — places to stage events and narrative
Movie sets — places for shooting scenes, the DLC’s key feature
Dread corridors — corridors symbolizing the weight of the craft, often paths with blocked entrances, elongated

Design and first iteration

At the start I received a preliminary layout from a designer, which I then iterated and used to create a blockout. The first attempts were about sizing the main halls for scene shooting and trying to find a way to structure the chapters — whether to keep an open structure and unlock gradually with progress, or to make a hard division into parts like in Last Note.
Early iterations immediately gave us answers — the level was too large, so it needed to be reduced and properly divided into parts. A large portion of the corridors was cut to condense the experience.

Below are the initial blockout iterations – larger vs. smaller halls and varying corridor complexity. On the right-hand side there was an additional corridor section that was ultimately cut. The Screening Room was also moved to the upper floor, and in the final version we added the Production Office, where you collect film reels and deposit them at the end of the Chapter.

I created an LDD on Miro where I defined specific metrics, outlined the flow, drew the layout divided by chapters, and presented the technical structure and guidelines.

Then I worked on the horror and narrative aspects, led an interdisciplinary brainstorm where we went through the story and created events that could represent it appropriately. I then filtered the ideas, structured them and placed them on the layout, creating a Miro board. Together with Maciej Dąbrowski we were also responsible for their implementation.

Chapter 1

Classic horror theme

Thought Corridor

The corridor is meant to represent the Director’s thought process: lots of dead ends, newly opening paths, and a tangle of cables – accompanied by VO of a conversation between the Director and the Actor.