If you want to understand where Grimmloch is right now, the most useful thing I can tell you is what building it is like, because it isn’t like building a normal indie game.
The closest thing history offers is the old Ultima Online private-server community. Back in the late 90s and early 2000s, a scattered group of players who loved UO figured out how to run their own versions of it. They didn’t work for the company. They taught themselves to build the server that ran the world, the client that players logged in with, and then all the custom tools and content that turned a bare world into a living roleplay setting. Small groups of dedicated people, hand-building persistent online worlds for the love of it. That’s the tradition Grimmloch comes out of, and a lot of you lived it.
Here’s the important part, and the one real difference. Those builders were recreating a game that already existed. They could watch the real UO servers and match them, because they had something to copy. We don’t. Grimmloch is built from scratch. The server, the client, the combat engine, the NPCs, all of it is original, with no existing game to reverse-engineer and nothing to check our work against.
That’s a harder road, and it’s the honest reason we need testing so badly. When you’re rebuilding something that already exists, “correct” is whatever the original did. When you’re building something new, there is no original. Nobody has ever run this engine but us, and there’s nothing anywhere to tell us where it’s wrong. The only way to find out is to put real people in it and watch what happens.
So that’s the frame for everything here. Same mountain those UO builders climbed, three layers and all, but no map. The next post walks through that history for anyone who wants it, and after that, I’ll show you exactly where we are on the climb.