Welcome to The Run!

The Run

About 2 weeks ago, I launched the first version of The Run, a new speedrun statistics tool. I posted about it on Reddit, and got a bunch of great comments, feedback and bug reports. In this blog post, I will introduce myself, tell you about the launch and about the future.

About me

I am a former Super Mario 64 speedrunner turned programmer (if you're reading this, good odds that you are too!) from the Netherlands who loves to build hobby projects. Since I also watch a bunch of speedrunning streams, I often see people asking "Did you get any good runs today?", "What's your best ever X split?", "When did you get your PB?", things like that. This got me thinking about building a tool that you could upload your splits to, and would give you all the info you'll ever need. My main requirements were:

• Everything completely free, no ads.
• One-to-one user mapping with Twitch. This way, viewers can replace twitch.tv/<username> with therun.gg/<username> and see the stats of the streamer they are watching.
• Easy to use. Logging in, uploading and viewing stats should all be straightforward.

Building The Run

So in the beginning of 2022, I started using some of my evenings (sometimes nights) and weekends to build a prototype of this thing, to see if I could put together something fun and useful. Turns out, it was a ton of fun! I put together a prototype and put up a message in the SM64 discord if they could try out the tool. A couple of days later, around 150 people had already uploaded runs!

This motivated me a lot to work on the tool more and make it more usable and reliable. I took all the feedback I could get from the community and worked on a first beta version, the one that is available right now. I put the tool public, posted about it on Reddit, and asked for any and all feedback. This way, I ironed out a ton of bugs, usability issues and weird interactions.

How can I help?

I am already thrilled to see so many people using the tool, either by uploading runs or checking out stats. If you want to help in other ways, following The Run on Twitter, joining the Discord or, if you want to take it a step further, tell your favorite streamer about the project and ask them to upload their splits!

About money: I built the architecture in a way that is very cheap, and only costs me a bunch of time right now, so I don't ask for any money. If the project takes off and becomes more expensive to keep running, I might consider doing a Patreon or something. Don't worry, I'll never put anything on the site behind a paywall!

What's next?

Now that the tool is pretty much stable (almost no uploads have failed for a couple of weeks now, most bugs are gone), I can start working on the Toadmap (Roadmap, but funny. Get it? Please laugh) I put together again. Here's what I'm looking forward to building next:

• More customization options. I want you to be able to edit your profile, like adding social urls, a bio, maybe custom color schemes, things like that. But also to be able to edit and delete your runs, give them descriptions, video urls, custom names, etc. This way the site should feel more like you own it, than just some static tool.
• UI work. I'm mainly a back-end developer, with not a lot of knowledge about frontend, design, or UX. And even though I tried my best to make the site look alright and usable, any experienced developer will notice that this is not my forte. I know how to make things work, not how to make them pretty. I will try to learn and collect as much knowledge and feedback as possible to take this aspect of the site to the next level. Also part of this is adding things like icons, game images and your custom split images. Everything is mostly text now, that can be improved a lot.
• Usability. Most graphs and tables are just that, static graphs and tables. They cannot be customized, filtered or searched through. I will find some ways to make this more suitable to anyone's use case and needs.
• More features! Right now, I want to build a new tab on the page of a run called Tools. This will have things like querying through your splits (how often did I get a sub 1:45.30 in January, things like that), calculating PB chance or best possible time from any split and split time, getting a bunch of custom graphs and charts etc. Basically, anything that is not readily available right now yet, can be available through this tab with some smart searching. There are many other features I want to be building. Just have to figure out prioritization :)
• Improving existing stuff. Even though I'm generally satisfied with the current state of the tool, a lot of things are still very improvable. The compare tab is a bit wonky, splits stats are not yet how I want them to be (consistenty score really does not help with anything yet), the search function is okay, but not great and the leaderboards are nothing to write home about yet, either. So all of that and much more I will revisit soon.

For the long term, my idea is to build a LiveSplit plugin that automatically sends the data to the tool, so that you never have to think about uploading your splits at all, and your stats are always up to date for your viewers to see.

Conclusion

I'm really glad that the first version was received so well and that so many people are already enjoying it. Thanks so much to everyone who uploaded, gave feedback or just checked out the tool. If you have any feedback, remarks or just want to talk, please do not hesitate to contact me. Let's keep working to make this thing used by many for a long time to come!