Unity’s Demo Team, creators of “Adam” and “The Blacksmith”, have announced Book of the Dead, a first-person interactive story showcasing the capabilities of Unity 2018 for powering high-end visuals for game productions.

Book of the Dead demonstrates what is possible when using Unity 2018’s new Scriptable Render Pipeline, which provides enhanced customizability of Unity’s rendering architecture, putting more control in the hands of the developers.

As the press release reads, the project is built on the new High-Definition Render Pipeline template shipping with Unity 2018. and various powerful customizations enabled by the SRP. Moreover, all of the natural environment assets in the demo are photogrammetry-scanned real-world objects and textures. The majority of them come from Quixel Megascans, a publicly available library of high-quality scanned assets, which is used widely by high-end game production and film VFX professionals alike.

The environments of the game are built in a way that allows the player to move around and explore. The camera is a continuous first-person camera, and when the player is teleported to a different location, the transition feels like a cinematic cut.

Unlike a traditional first-person game camera, however, here the game camera is designed to have a cinematic handheld feel, with inertia and weight. The height, speed, and shakiness reflect the emotional state of the protagonist and change as the player progresses through the story controlling the character.

Enjoy the first official screenshots for Book of the Dead, as well as its debut trailer. Book of the Dead targets a 2018 release and the following trailer is representative of the actual gameplay experience!