Grimmloch, a social MMORPG for roleplayers
Posted: 08 May 2026, 18:43
Hi all,
I am Lara Rivera, co-founder and lead game designer at Opulent Code. We are building Grimmloch, a text-based social MMORPG grounded in European, Slavic, and Mediterranean folklore, targeting a launch on February 14, 2027. The Steam trailer just went live and I wanted to share it here, in part because the showcase community has been generous in offering permission and in part because the UI story is genuinely a load-bearing part of what we are building.
Grimmloch is a Unity 6 client rendering through NoesisGUI/XAML, sitting on top of a custom Akka.NET event-sourced backend. The choice of Noesis was not a default-pick. We are building a text-forward game where the interface itself has to read more like a finely-bound book than a typical game HUD, and we needed a UI system that could scale to a desktop-class application without drowning a small team in maintenance work.
Some scope detail, in case anyone is sizing a similar project:
Real thanks to the Noesis team -- you have built something that lets a small studio punch well above its weight, and I am happy to answer questions about our binding patterns, our DockingTheme structure, or how we handled the multi-stage workflow synchronization if anyone is wrestling with similar problems.
-- Lara
I am Lara Rivera, co-founder and lead game designer at Opulent Code. We are building Grimmloch, a text-based social MMORPG grounded in European, Slavic, and Mediterranean folklore, targeting a launch on February 14, 2027. The Steam trailer just went live and I wanted to share it here, in part because the showcase community has been generous in offering permission and in part because the UI story is genuinely a load-bearing part of what we are building.
Grimmloch is a Unity 6 client rendering through NoesisGUI/XAML, sitting on top of a custom Akka.NET event-sourced backend. The choice of Noesis was not a default-pick. We are building a text-forward game where the interface itself has to read more like a finely-bound book than a typical game HUD, and we needed a UI system that could scale to a desktop-class application without drowning a small team in maintenance work.
Some scope detail, in case anyone is sizing a similar project:
- The project currently spans 63 XAML files and 58 ViewModels across 36+ interconnected windows, which break down into a 24-window character creation system organized into a 6-phase workflow plus 12 gameplay windows, totaling roughly 280+ data binding points
- A single DockingTheme.xaml drives the entire visual identity (22 colors in our medieval fantasy palette, 30+ brushes, and 8+ button styles), which means a palette change is a one-file edit rather than 36 prefab edits
- Our central CharacterCreationService fires OnCharacterDataChanged events that every dependent window automatically picks up through XAML bindings, which has saved us a significant amount of manual synchronization code we would have otherwise had to write by hand
- We have built 10+ reusable custom controls (ChatControl, RichTextEditBox, HSVColorPicker, and FontPreview among them) that compose cleanly into the major windows rather than being duplicated across them
- A small ResponsiveToolbarHelper pattern handles text-mode versus icon-mode toolbars at a 400px breakpoint, reused across windows rather than re-implemented per window
Real thanks to the Noesis team -- you have built something that lets a small studio punch well above its weight, and I am happy to answer questions about our binding patterns, our DockingTheme structure, or how we handled the multi-stage workflow synchronization if anyone is wrestling with similar problems.
-- Lara