One Year of Zhovten Games — Halloween 2026

October 31, 2026 marks the first anniversary of Zhovten Games.

A year ago, we introduced our small independent studio and announced InterDead, a narrative-driven speculative fiction horror game built around an unusual relationship between storytelling, player behaviour and game systems.

Today, on Halloween, we can finally share an important intermediate result: the first closed beta of InterDead is available to a limited group of testers.

October has been a particularly difficult month for us, and we haven't had the opportunity to prepare our traditional comprehensive development update. We intend to publish that review toward the end of the year, bringing together the work completed across our projects.

For now, we want to focus on what has changed in InterDead, how we are testing it, and what comes next.

From Narrative Architecture to an Executable Core

In our Summer 2026 development update, we described the architecture we wanted to establish for InterDead.

The scenario would remain an independent linguistic and narrative source. Game logic would be implemented in a portable C++ core, while different presentation environments would provide their own interfaces to the same underlying system.

That principle continues to guide development.

Our current architecture follows a consistent structure:

Narrative source
→ C++20 Game Core
→ Console / WebAssembly
→ Unreal Engine (planned)

The C++ core is now a working part of the project. It manages gameplay states, rules, time, knowledge and interactions independently of the presentation layer.

This matters particularly for InterDead because its narrative mechanics involve a considerable number of interconnected reactions. Available actions, knowledge, previous decisions, stress and the passage of time can influence what happens next. A seemingly minor interaction may affect what the player is able to perceive, understand or do later.

We want these dependencies to remain consistent across every future version of the game, rather than developing separate sets of rules for each platform.

The story defines the experience. The core makes its rules executable.

Testing Without the Comfort of Presentation

At the moment, much of our testing takes place in the environment that is probably least forgiving of mistakes: the console.

Without visual effects, animation or a carefully arranged interface to carry the experience, the system has to demonstrate its own coherence. Every action, condition, transition and consequence becomes easier to inspect.

The console allows us to examine how the narrative behaves as a system: which responses are available, why they become available, how states change, and whether the same sequence produces the expected result.

Alongside this, we are testing a minimal interactive WebAssembly projection. It runs the shared C++ core in a browser and allows us to evaluate how its rules translate into player-facing interactions.

The WebAssembly version already gives us a way to examine the relationship between narrative timing, dialogue, interface controls and player decisions. Its presentation remains deliberately restrained while we work through the underlying experience.

Both environments serve the same purpose: to establish a consistent narrative and gameplay foundation before adding more elaborate visual layers.

Closed Beta and the Next Public Milestone

The current beta is available to a limited group of people.

At this stage, our priority is testing the narrative core, reviewing complex interactions, correcting inconsistencies and evaluating how the experience behaves under different player decisions.

There is still work to be done on the content, pacing and implementation. Each testing cycle gives us another opportunity to compare the intended narrative experience with what the system actually produces.

Our goal is to make a playable WebAssembly slice covering the first two chapters available for public viewing before the end of 2026.

This remains a development target, dependent on the results of the current testing and the remaining content work.

Looking further ahead, we hope that 2027 will allow us to demonstrate the first implementation of InterDead in Unreal Engine.

That would represent a particularly important transition for the project. The narrative and gameplay foundation we are building now could begin to acquire a fuller visual identity, with scenes, environments and presentation capable of communicating the world beyond text and minimal interaction.

Perhaps that will also mark the beginning of a new stage in which we can introduce InterDead through its own visual language.

We would very much like to reach that point.

An Environment for Building the Game

October also brought significant changes to the way we organize our development work.

We deployed a private production workspace for InterDead, bringing together project documents, their relationships, development tools and access to game builds.

The workspace helps us maintain a more controlled connection between the narrative material, technical implementation and the artifacts we are testing.

We intend to present this environment separately when it is ready for a broader introduction.

For now, its role is practical: helping us manage an increasingly complex project while preserving the relationships between its different parts.

One Year Later

Our first year has been filled with research, experiments, architectural decisions, revisions and an amount of work that would be difficult to compress into a single anniversary post.

InterDead has developed from a proposed narrative experience into a working technical system with its own rules, executable core and playable projections.

There is still a considerable distance between this stage and the game we ultimately want to create. But we now have something concrete to test, challenge and improve.

This publication marks an intermediate milestone. Our larger annual review is planned for the end of December, when we hope to bring together the wider results of the studio's work.

For today, we simply want to mark the occasion.

Zhovten Games is one year old.

Thank you to everyone who has followed our work, supported our experiments or taken an interest in InterDead.

Happy Halloween!

Zhovten Games
October 31, 2026