In 2014, Daniel Brockhaus did something unexpected: he open-sourced Mercenaries of Astonia, the MMORPG he'd built and run for years under Intent Software. I grabbed the code the moment I saw it. Not because I had a plan. Not because I thought I could build something better. I grabbed it because this was the game I played as a child — the game where I met my wife — and the idea that I could run my own instance, modify it, understand how it worked, was irresistible.
The Codebase
The first thing I discovered when I opened the source: this was the work of a genius, or a madman, or possibly both. The codebase was written in C — old C, the kind that assumes you know what you're doing with memory and doesn't bother checking. Quest states, NPC states, character data — everything was stored as raw memory dump blobs. Literally memcpy'd from server memory into the database. No schema, no normalization, just binary blobs that only the server process could interpret.
The patterns were obscure but clever. Hobbyish but real. This wasn't enterprise software — it was a labor of love, built by someone who cared deeply about the game and not at all about software engineering orthodoxy. And honestly? That's what made it beautiful.
First Steps
Getting it to compile was the first battle. Getting it to run was the second. I rented a CentOS dedicated server from Hetzner — way overkill hardware for what I needed, but I didn't know that yet. I just wanted to see the world load, walk around in it, and feel that connection to the game I'd loved since I was a kid.
But a server without players is just a sad process listening on a port. There was no website, no way to sign up, nothing. So I built the first account creation and character creation page — a barebones PHP site with a login form, a database, and calls to C-compiled executables that did the actual heavy lifting of creating accounts and characters. I'm not proud of the PHP functions I used. Let's just say "unsafe" is putting it mildly. But it was functional, and it was enough.
From there, I spent a lot of time building what was, for the time, a quite impressive website. Player profiles, high scores, game statistics, community features — the works. It's twelve years old now and hopelessly outdated, which is exactly why we're building the new one. But back then? It felt like building a world, not just a website.
Once players could register, create characters, and download the client, it started feeling real. People signed up. Old friends reunited. Players who'd known each other in the original game found each other again in Ugaris. It was magical.
Then we wanted to change things. And we really started looking into the code...
The Personal Connection
I need to be clear about something: Ugaris was never about money. It was never about fame, or building a portfolio piece, or proving something to anyone. I played Mercenaries of Astonia as a child. I met my wife on this game. The world, the mechanics, the community — they shaped who I am. Taking the codebase and building something from it was a way of preserving that, honoring it, and making sure the game didn't just disappear when the original servers went dark.
Every late night I've spent on this project, every weekend I've sacrificed, every architectural decision I've agonized over — it all comes back to that. The game gave my life meaning. This is me giving something back.
The Modernization Journey
The BLOB migration was the first big one. I'd been running the server for a while when I realized that the raw memory dump approach meant I couldn't query anything. Want to know how many players have completed a specific quest? Can't do it. Want to debug why an NPC is behaving oddly? Good luck reading binary blobs. So I started the long, terrifying process of converting every blob into normalized database entries.
This took months. Every wrong step could corrupt player data. Every migration had to be reversible. I tested obsessively, backed up everything, and moved one table at a time. When it was done, I could finally query the database like a normal person. It was the single most important architectural change I've made to Ugaris.
After that came MySQL connection pooling and ProxySQL for load balancing, which transformed the database layer from a fragile single-connection setup into something that could actually handle concurrent players without falling over. Then containerization — Docker wrapping each service, defining proper dependencies, making deploys repeatable. I've considered moving everything to Kubernetes — maybe once the Steam release happens — but for now, Docker on dedicated infrastructure does the job, and I'd rather have stability than complexity I don't need yet.
The Architecture Today
Ugaris runs on a polyglot stack that reflects its organic growth. The game server is still C — the original core, battle-tested and running. The client uses SDL3 for cross-platform rendering. I've built a Go API backend for account management, leaderboards, and external integrations. The website is being rewritten in Astro, replacing the old PHP site. The Discord bot is Python, with full chat synchronization between Discord and in-game. The launcher is Electron, and there's a C++ chat server handling real-time communication.
On the infrastructure side: MySQL with connection pooling, ProxySQL, containerized with Docker, with full CI/CD pipelines. It's over-engineered for the player count, and I don't care. It's built right, and I learned something at every step. Kubernetes is on the roadmap — maybe once the Steam release happens — but for now, stability wins over complexity.
The Community
The Ugaris community is small but passionate. They're nostalgic players who remember the original game, new players who stumbled in through Discord or word of mouth, and people who just think it's cool that someone is still building an isometric MMORPG in 2026. The Discord server is where it all happens — development updates, bug reports, idle chat, and the occasional heated debate about game balance.
I know most of them by name. That's the beauty of a small community. You're not a ticket number; you're a person who cares about the same weird game I do.
Why It Matters
Not everything worth doing is about scale. Sometimes it's about the game that gave your life meaning. Sometimes it's about the codebase that taught you C, the migration that taught you databases, the infrastructure that pushed you into DevOps, and the community that kept you going when the code was fighting back.
Ugaris is that project for me. It's not my job. It's not my side hustle. It's the thing I keep building because I can't imagine not building it. And after eleven years, I'm still not done.