Drew Porter

Live Operations · Community · Game Systems Design · Discord Tooling

Garson, Ontario, Canada drew@drewporter.ca drewporter.ca Remote · Eastern Time

Eleven seasons designing and operating a persistent multiplayer game world — thousands of players, an original custom map every season, and a self-run store averaging about $5,000 a month. I currently build and operate a production Discord application for a game clan. Ten-plus years leading crews in structural steel underneath both.

Games & Community

Founder & Game Director — Coastal Gaming

2019 – 2022

Multi-game community. ATLAS (flagship), ARK, Minecraft, Valheim.

Designed and shipped 11 seasons of an original persistent multiplayer world, each with a new custom map, ruleset and published patch notes.
Built player-facing world maps with island naming, biome labelling, territory colouring and wayfinding. Worlds ran up to 36 grids, drawing 1,000–2,000 unique players per season cycle and regularly hitting per-grid population ceilings.
Designed a player-elected faction leadership system — monthly elections, exclusive war-declaration rights, a diplomatic channel between opposing leaders, and mutiny votes for removal. Restricted raid windows to weekends, structurally reducing churn from offline raiding.
Segmented the playerbase into four factions with individually tuned rulesets and explicit onboarding guidance, so solo beginners and large raiding companies could share one world.
Recruited, trained and managed ~20 volunteer admins (5–8 concurrent) across four game communities.
Operated a storefront averaging ~$5K/month and peaking at $11K; also sold merchandise and ran a Patreon. Secured a Razer sponsorship through direct outreach.
Programmed 10 recurring live event formats — boat races, prison breaks, storage wars, maze navigation, PvP arenas and more — built by hand in-engine and streamed on Twitch.
Organised and hosted a 24-hour charity livestream for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, raising approximately $2,000.
Grew a Discord community to 2,000–5,000 members, sustained at Level 3 by voluntary member boosts; roughly 810 remain active years after shutdown.
Engineered a live workaround when the host broke in-game map rendering and could not fix it — designed and rebuilt mass player housing each season so players could self-repair their maps.

Developer & Operator — Pax Dei Clan Bot

2025 – present

Node.js Discord application, v2.2.0, in production.

15 feature modules including a raid planner and scheduler, market price tracker with craft-flip profitability analysis, clan resource ledgers with verified donation tracking, a crafter directory, live leaderboards and scraped game-data lookups.
Built with discord.js v14, better-sqlite3 (WAL), Playwright for automated data scraping, and a feature-module architecture with a separate interaction dispatch layer.
Runs under PM2 on a DigitalOcean droplet with nightly integrity-checked database backups, retention pruning, documented restore procedure, log rotation and fail-fast config validation at boot.

Structural Steel

Structural Division Lead — CCM Group

2024 – present

Own an entire structural division end to end — estimating, bidding and project management. Over $15M in completed project value in two years, peaking at 50+ tradespeople across four concurrent projects.

Union Ironworker — Ironworkers Local 700 / 786

2004 – 2024

Journeyman since 2007. Progressed from tradesman through foreman, general foreman and structural superintendent.
Over ten years in site management, leading crews on mining, smelting and heavy industrial structural projects — scheduling, coordination, safety and delivery on deadline.

Skills

Live operationsSeason design, content cadence, event programming, economy tuning, player retention

CommunityDiscord architecture, moderation policy, staff recruitment and management, conflict resolution

DesignGame systems, world and territory design, onboarding, player segmentation, monetisation

TechnicalNode.js, discord.js, SQLite, Playwright, PM2, Linux server operations, Git

ProductionEstimating, scheduling, crew leadership, delivery under deadline

ToolsPhotoshop, OBS, Twitch, server grid editors

Availability

Full-time · open to contract · remote, hybrid or relocation · Eastern Time · Ontario-based and OIDMTC-eligible, which returns up to 40% of eligible labour cost to Ontario studios.