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
2023 – present
- Estimating, bidding and project management for commercial structural steel projects.
Union Ironworker — Local [###]
2004 – present
- Progressed from tradesman through foreman, general foreman and site superintendent.
- Over ten years in site management, leading crews on commercial 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
~30 hours per week · contract or part-time · fully remote, Eastern Time · Ontario-based and OIDMTC-eligible, which returns up to 40% of eligible labour cost to Ontario studios.