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Back to the Drawing Board: How RuneScape's Co-Creator Made Brighter Shores
Andrew Gower left Jagex in 2010, built his own engine, and spent eight years on a new MMO. How they made it.
Sharpen your pickaxe, adventurer. This one's for everyone who grew up in Lumbridge.
Andrew Gower made RuneScape with his brother Paul, and it launched in 2001. Millions of players later, he walked away from it, and started over from nothing.
Why would anyone leave RuneScape?
Gower left Jagex, the studio behind RuneScape, in 2010, and soon founded his own company, Fen Research.
His first project there wasn't a game at all. In 2012, he told MCV/DEVELOP he was building a programming language made for games. He'd kept chipping away at the problem until he had a breakthrough.
How long does a new MMO take?
Work on Brighter Shores began in 2016. It reached Steam Early Access on November 6, 2024: eight years later.
It runs on Fenforge, the studio's own engine, and Paul Gower, RuneScape's co-creator, is its narrative designer. The brothers are working together again.
What makes it different?
- Episodes. The world is split into episodes, each with its own places, professions and stories.
- Puzzle-like quests. In the RuneScape spirit, quests ask you to think, not just to fetch.
- A simple deal. It's free to play, with an optional Premium Pass for more episodes and professions, and no microtransactions.
Is it finished?
Not yet, and it says so. Its Steam page lists what has to land before Early Access ends, including player-to-player trading, dungeons, a party system, PvP and Episode 5.
When we checked on the night of September 30, about 102 people were playing it on Steam.
What can you take from it?
- Build tools that make you faster. Gower spent years on his own language and engine before the game. Most of us should use an existing engine, but the lesson stands: invest in what you'll use every day.
- Small, finished pieces. Episodes let a small team ship a world in parts, instead of all at once.
- Say what's missing. A public to-do list turns impatient players into patient ones.
- A good idea survives a restart. The skills you learn on one game carry into the next.
