Making the Prison

At the end of the first level, Cyrus is beaten and taken away by Elexis' guards to the Great Prison. In the world of Scroll of the Fallen, the Asrodinian Empire is known for its extraordinary military power and its ruthless, unforgiving treatment of enemy war-leaders. The Great Prison doesn’t just hold ordinary prisoners of Asrodin, it houses the warlords, the defeated champions, kings and noblemen from all over the world who dared to cross the empire.

Prison Level Blueprint

The prison level was one of the first levels we hashed out in the pre-production phase. We wanted it to give the player a sense of high tension and risk. Cyrus has been released from his cell by an unknown man with a key and must find his weapons and escape from the prison. 
Our aim was to convey this feeling of tension without changing the mechanics of the basic gameplay too drastically.
We knew the prison level would require a strong design to pull this concept off. The plan was to create a set of illusionary choices; offering different paths, one leading to a large well lit room full of guards and the other leading around that room through a darkened corridor. The player doesn't have weapons to fight for the first half of the level, which makes the well lit rooms far less favourable. Due to this, the choice of well lit rooms full of guards vs. darkened halls quickly dissolves into a calculation in which the only answer is the safe routes. After two of these "avoidance scenarios," when the player has learnt the answer is to avoid guard-filled rooms, they find themselves in the rafters above a large room filled with guards. They must carefully perform feats of platforming to activate a distraction in the next room over.
At this point the player can move through to the next room and pick up their weapons and to their escape.

To model the level we used the Platinum Arts Sandbox to create a basic blocked out model of the level and to separate sections to smooth out the pipeline for texturing. From there we put the level into the Unity engine to place assets and set up triggers for story and game events.