Hello everyone, I’m Gary, co-founder of FLYOS and Creative Director of Eternal Whispers. For our very first dev diary, I’d like to explore one of the most important and defining aspects of the project: its visual identity.
How do we portray Montreal within the universe of Vampire: The Masquerade without simply recreating the city street by street? How do we transform an artistic legacy born from a board game into a coherent digital world? How do we create stylized nighttime environments that remain readable and rich enough to support exploration, storytelling, and player choice?
I also want to show you the game as it is actually being made. Some scenes are already close to our final vision. Others are still going through composition, lighting, texturing, or set-dressing passes.
In this dev diary, we will look back at the origins of our visual language, the references that shaped it, and the stages required to bring it to life.
1. An Identity Born with Vampire: The Masquerade – CHAPTERS
The artistic origins of Eternal Whispers predate the video game itself.
In 2019, we began working on Vampire: The Masquerade – CHAPTERS, a narrative board game funded in 2020 and first released in 2022 with a new definitive edition now about to launch in four languages. CHAPTERS is a story-driven tabletop role-playing adventure in a box, where players explore various locations, make meaningful choices, interact with characters, and face the consequences of their decisions through over 60 scenarios.
From its earliest stages, CHAPTERS explored Montreal at the end of the city’s period under Sabbat control. We wanted to build environments that felt coherent, striking, and rich enough to convey the weight of that legacy, while giving the same attention to the characters who inhabited them. Adapting established figures and designing new protagonists who could stand naturally alongside them played a major role in shaping the project’s visual identity. We drew considerable inspiration from the Montreal by Night sourcebook, which introduced several of the characters who appear in our story.
To achieve this, we collaborated with several remarkable artists, including Dominik Mayer (Magic: The Gathering), Marc Simonetti (Game of Thrones, Dune), and Sergey Vasnev (Sony, Warhammer). Their work helped establish Montreal's strong visual identity in CHAPTERS. Some of those illustrations have also found a new life within Eternal Whispers.
The Key Art of Eternal Whispers was created by Bastien Lecouffe-Deharme, an artist I had dreamed of working with for a long time. His work plays an essential role in shaping the first impression of the game and the promise of its universe. Here are a few sketches of our initial tests.
However, bringing CHAPTERS into the world of video games was never about recreating the board game exactly. Video games have their own language, rhythm, and codes. While both projects share a common origin and artistic foundation, their narrative and visual paths often diverge — sometimes quite a lot. Players familiar with CHAPTERS will recognize certain elements, but Eternal Whispers is ultimately a distinct experience. Likewise, those who discover the video game first will find something new in CHAPTERS: a unique RPG in a box experience.
2. Translating a Physical World into a Digital Space
A board game is necessarily organized around physical components and clearly defined spaces. A video game allows us to build larger, more vertical, and more immersive environments. We nevertheless wanted to preserve something of the bite-sized format of CHAPTERS: concentrated narrative blocks, each built around a mission with its own identity, progression, and opportunities for exploration.
The structure of Eternal Whispers is therefore based on an alternation between two kinds of spaces:
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The Haven, where the player prepares, investigates, develops relationships, and learns about the challenges ahead;
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The missions, designed as self-contained narrative chapters lasting approximately one to two hours, depending on the player’s decisions and level of exploration.
Each mission brings players closer to uncovering the game’s central mysteries, understanding its shifting political landscape, and shaping their character’s personal journey.
Our protagonist, Gabe, is not an ancient vampire. They were Embraced, staked through the heart, and buried on the very night of their creation, during the infamous event known as the Night of Ashes. When you awaken twenty years later, you are still effectively a fledgling, but a fledgling born from a world that has since disappeared: The Sabbat.
That premise shapes both the game’s narrative and its art direction. The protagonist discovers Montreal while simultaneously rediscovering their own heritage.
3. Sam’s Haven: A Place That Evolves with the Player
Between missions, players return to Sam’s Haven.
Sam is a Thin-blood who lives beneath a small neighborhood bookshop selling somewhat antiquated books. The store does not attract large crowds, but it belongs to the local landscape. It is the sort of place residents are proud to have in their neighborhood, even if they do not visit it often. That discreet presence provides Sam with a believable front while protecting her from unwanted attention.
During the day, Sam’s accomplice Jade runs the bookshop and helps protect her secret—though Jade has an agenda of her own, which you may uncover over the course of the game. Once the store closes, Sam is free to pursue her nocturnal activities with you at her side. At first, however, you are more of a burden than a partner. You’re the new Kindred in town, placed under her watch by order of the Sheriff.
As a Thin-blood, her safety and status within vampire society remain precarious. However, she has earned a certain degree of respectability through the concoctions she creates using Thin-blood Alchemy.
The Haven was designed to be much more than a menu between missions. It is a narrative environment in its own right, where players will be able to:
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Get Alchemy concoctions from Sam;
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obtain equipment and resources;
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examine the evidence board summarizing previous events;
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uncover clues about the next mission;
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spend XP to level up your character;
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strengthen or damage their relationship with Sam (or Toy);
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solve day-to-day vampire events that don’t tie in strongly to the main plot.
Players may grow closer to Sam and develop a more intimate relationship with her, but they may also sabotage that relationship. The Haven must therefore visually communicate both the evolution of this bond and the consequences of decisions made during missions.
4. A Recognizable but Reimagined Montreal
Eternal Whispers is not intended as a historical or geographical reconstruction of Montreal. Rather than exploring a street-by-street open world, players will experience a carefully curated vision of the city, shaped to serve the game’s story and atmosphere.
Nevertheless, we want Montreal to be immediately recognizable through its identity. That includes landmarks such as the Five Roses Flour sign and the Mount Royal Cross, but also more everyday elements: its neighborhoods, basements, small businesses, architecture, perpetual construction sites, and, naturally, its iconic orange traffic cones.
We are stylizing the city to address three fundamental needs:
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supporting the narrative;
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creating powerful visual compositions;
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designing spaces that are compelling to navigate and explore.
The environments must allow for multiple approaches. Some missions include secondary routes, side passages, underground spaces, or sewer systems. A location’s visual identity must remain strong without undermining spatial readability or the player’s freedom.
The story takes place over approximately one year, meaning that Montreal will evolve with the seasons. Players will encounter autumnal environments, rainy streets, snowfall, accumulated snow left behind by plows, footprints, and summer scenes without winter coverage.
These variations are not intended to be purely cosmetic. They should convey the passage of time and create the impression that the city continues to exist while Gabe advances through the entire game.
5. Painting the World
I was looking for a balance between 2D and 3D, between characters with believable human proportions and environments that can be stylized more freely. Shapes, colors, textures, and sometimes even proportions may be reinterpreted to make certain scenes feel like explorable concept art. We chose style over photorealism.
Nearly every texture in Eternal Whispers is reworked and painted by hand. Rather than relying on ready-made texture packs, we approach each surface individually, giving it a more organic character and ensuring that it belongs to the game’s visual language. That language draws heavily from Gothic art and Impressionism, combining dark, dramatic forms with expressive color, light, and visible painterly texture. Some parts of the environments are built from flat, hand-painted 2D elements placed within the 3D space (such as the sky behind the Mount Royal Cross at the end of the trailer). We take a similar approach to the character portraits shown during conversations: each one is drawn by hand, and none are generated using AI.
The vast majority of our 3D assets are also modeled specifically for the game. While we gather references and draw inspiration from real objects and places, the final assets are created around the project’s particular artistic and technical needs. This gives us greater control over both optimization and stylization. Because the game is viewed primarily from a top-down perspective, most objects are not meant to be examined from extremely close range. Their shapes, details, and textures are therefore designed for the distance and angle from which players will actually experience them.
6. Composing Each Scene Like a Cinematic Shot
We try to approach every environment as if it were a scene from a film.
Composition, volume, color, and light must create a strong image while guiding the player’s eye and movement. Our intention is for the game’s most important shots to evoke some of the cinematic imagery that has influenced us.
At the end of the first mission, a scene takes place above the former Five Roses Flour mill. The enormous red neon letters illuminate the space and create a powerful atmosphere reminiscent of films such as Blade Runner.
The catacombs draw from the visual imagination of Interview with the Vampire, particularly the scenes surrounding Louis and Armand’s encounter in Paris. Eric’s apartment in the second mission incorporates references in its composition, color, and lighting to works such as Breaking Bad and Trainspotting.
These references are not models we reproduce literally. They provide us with a shared vocabulary that helps define the intended emotion of a scene: unease, grandeur, abandonment, intimacy, danger, or devotion.
7. Bringing to Life a World That Almost Never Sees the Sun
Creating a game that takes place primarily at night presents a significant challenge. Most scenes are illuminated by artificial sources: neon signs, urban lighting, interior lamps, and, more rarely, open flames (although we know vampires and fire obviously do not make the best combination).
We must create dark and dramatic atmospheres without sacrificing the readability required by gameplay. Lighting needs to reveal spaces, guide players, and reinforce emotion without dispelling the mystery of the night.
Lighting is also one of the areas that will evolve the most throughout production. We are working within a very tight production schedule. Each mission must first be developed far enough for us to validate its structure, gameplay, and narrative progression. We can then return to individual scenes to improve:
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lighting;
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textures;
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set dressing;
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composition;
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readability;
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atmospheric effects;
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the density of environmental storytelling.
Images shared during development should therefore not all be considered final. They represent different stages of an evolving production process.
8. Telling Stories Through Environmental Details
An environment does more than provide a setting for a mission. It can tell players what happened before they arrived. Game development works as a cascading process. A new asset created for one scene may eventually enrich several other locations. Conversely, identifying a new narrative need may require us to return to a mission that is already playable and deepen its environmental storytelling.
For example, during the first mission, players hunt Eric, a rogue ghoul. In the second mission, they discover his apartment.
We want the location to visually express Eric’s relationship with his domitor. Portraits and other personal objects will show how emotionally attached he had become and how that attachment eventually developed into a form of total devotion. We eventually reach Caleb's office atop the iconic 1000 de la Gauchetière tower, where every detail of the interior reflects his personality and ideals.
This kind of environmental storytelling is essential. The objects themselves, their placement, and their condition should help players understand a character before a single line of dialogue explicitly confirms their story.
9. The Sabbat’s Remains Beneath the City
Montreal still bears the scars of its Sabbat history. The Sabbat may have disappeared from the city's political structure, but its architecture, former territories, and rituals continue to haunt the underground. During the game’s prologue, players discover the “Hollow,” an enormous chamber where members of the Sabbat once gathered and tortured their victims.
This gothic underground architecture must give the faction an immediately recognizable identity. It represents a world that has supposedly disappeared, but whose traces are beginning to resurface. Gabe is personally connected to that legacy. Embraced during the Sabbat era and neutralized on the same night, they awaken in a transformed city. They may choose to embrace what they were originally intended to become or attempt to find a place within the Camarilla.
This tension is reflected in two of the protagonist’s relationships. Sam may represent a path closer to humanity, while Toy connects the character more directly to their Sabbat heritage.
Toy originates from the established lore of Vampire: The Masquerade and the Montreal by Night sourcebook, published in 1997. Reinterpreting a character who already exists within this universe requires us to respect his established identity while giving him a distinct, contemporary, and immediately readable presence within our game.
10. An Elegant Interface for a Monstrous World
Art direction does not end with environments and characters. The user interface (UI) is an integral part of the game’s world. We have chosen a palette built primarily around black, copper, and touches of gold. We want to move away from deliberately trashy or heavily blood-soaked interfaces to express another aspect of vampirism: something chic, elegant, and almost graceful.
This visual approach must nevertheless remain in service of comfort and usability.
Eternal Whispers is a CRPG containing a very large amount of dialogue. Players will spend considerable time reading, comparing options, and making decisions. The typography and UX structure must provide excellent readability without feeling disconnected from the game’s overall identity.
The presentation and pacing of dialogue, along with the way information is organized on screen, are artistic considerations as much as functional ones. We are also developing accessibility options to make the game comfortable and approachable for a broad range of players. If there are particular features or considerations you would like to see addressed, we welcome your suggestions and would be grateful to hear about your experiences.
11. Acknowledging Our Influences Without Losing Our Identity
The work accomplished by Disco Elysium has naturally influenced many CRPG creators in recent years, and we do not want to pretend otherwise. Through its focus on text, choice, and narrative freedom, Eternal Whispers is part of the creative momentum that followed.
Even if the comparison was broadly mentioned, and as much as it sounds a compliment to our ears, our ambition is not to create a “Vampire Elysium.”
Our aesthetic and narrative challenges are different. We are not portraying the same kind of protagonist, telling the same kind of story, or constructing the same visual language. We want to create a distinctly gothic experience built around aesthetic, moral, narrative, and visual layers. An experience that belongs fully within the universe of Vampire: The Masquerade while possessing a voice of its own.
Conclusion — An Identity Still Taking Shape
The visual identity of Eternal Whispers exists at the intersection of several legacies.
The first is the legacy of CHAPTERS, where our vision of Montreal first began to take shape. The second is the legacy of Vampire: The Masquerade ttrpg, its history, and its factions. The final component is our own interpretation of the city: a nocturnal, seasonal, stylized Montreal marked by the remains of a vanished Sabbat.
Our goal is to create memorable scenes and immersive environments, but also spaces in which players can investigate, explore, and make meaningful decisions. We want light, color, objects, and architecture to participate in the storytelling just as much as dialogue does.
There is still a great deal of work ahead of us. Some missions will continue to evolve as we improve their lighting, textures, composition, and set dressing. We hope that over the coming months, you will enjoy watching this video game experience come to life as much as we enjoy building it.
