From Idea to 479,000 Views in 24 Hours
On a Sunday in July, playing Old School RuneScape with my brothers, an idea came back to me: what if, every time we cast a spell, the game showed the equivalent in gold you just spent? Magic is expensive, but you only see the cost when you buy the runes, not when you use them. RuneLite, a game client, has user-created plugins, which can do something like this. I had attempted a plugin before, with Opus, but it went slowly and with difficulty and someone had already done the idea I had at that time. For this idea: Opus wouldn’t make it happen in my time and energy budget.
But maybe Fable could do it. At 4:51pm, I sent this prompt:
let’s do a new plugin, from scratch. Behavior: every time a spell is cast, or a ranged ammunition is consumed (ie. not dropped or brought back by Ava’s), a number appears, which is the GE price total of all the runes or the ammunition. Also, it plays a coin jingle sound. It’s a meme plugin, and I think it will be amusing.
Fable had a working local client with the effect in 4 minutes. We tried it out blasting Ancient Magicks at Pest Control, and about died laughing. After trying it out, I wrote: “Wow, this is amazing. It’s way more hilarious than I expected, and I think it’s gonna go far.”
Several additional funny scenarios (for example, the Dwarf multicannon) were added in short order. The development loop was tight: trunk-based pushes straight to main, the three of us pulling changes to our laptops, running the built client, and testing right there, at the LAN party in Tom’s bedroom.
From there, we were laser focused on distribution: get it merged into RuneLite’s plugin hub, and hard launch it on the 2007scape subreddit with a funny montage. Luke had already achieved a viral meme there, and we had a good idea of what would do well. We were the audience, after all.
We submitted the PR to plugin hub at 9:37 PM. It was approved at 10:11 PM. In the meantime, we were preparing clips and scenarios for the montage.
The next day, Luke posted the montage to r/2007scape, and it took off. My phone blew up all day with replies, and by 4:51pm — 24 hours to the minute from the first prompt — it had reached 479,000 views, and 3,048 upvotes. The post would go on to exceed 900,000 views and 5,500 upvotes, with the plugin itself rocketing to the #3 meme plugin in RuneLite.
I knew we had a winner on our hands, and I’m really proud we were able to execute on this miniature product launch. We nailed the feature and we nailed the distribution. I’ve heard that when you catch lightning in a bottle, you just know. We knew!
We even won ourselves a prize: a userbase, with the requests and bug reports that come with it. Later today we’ll start working on V2, to bring in those requests. I’m looking forward to the day that we nail this on a product that generates revenue! For now, I will be content with the laughs. and the pain. Magic costs a lot of gold.