Twelve months ago RuneFist was three people, a whiteboard and a rented server. Today we're a little bigger, a lot more focused, and finally able to talk openly about what worked, what didn't, and what we're doing differently next year.
What we shipped
- Two Bedrock Marketplace maps — both hit the front page.
- RuneBound closed alpha, now running with ~300 concurrent players on peak days.
- A small but real brand, a website, and this dispatch feed.
What we got wrong
We over-scoped the first RuneBound region by at least 30%. We underestimated how much time community management takes when you have something people actually care about. And we massively under-invested in tooling for the first six months.
“Every hour we didn't spend on tooling, we spent twice on content production later. It's the single biggest lesson from the year.
What we're doing about it
- A dedicated tools engineer is our next hire, not another content role.
- Community management is now a first-class function, not an afterthought.
- Scoping now includes an explicit 'what do we cut if we're 30% over' list from day one.