Eleven seasons operating a persistent multiplayer world. A production Discord application running today. Ten years of leading structural ironworking crews underneath both.
These overlap more than they look like they should. Running a game community means designing the systems people play inside, building whatever tooling doesn't exist yet, keeping it going week after week, and being there when it goes wrong.
Player-elected faction leadership with mutiny mechanics and scheduled warfare windows. Roaming PvP zones that moved on a timer. Risk-gated farming areas. Four parallel rulesets so beginners and raiders could share one world. All designed, shipped, and validated against thousands of live players.
A 15-module Node.js Discord application in production today — raid planner, market tracker with profit analysis, resource ledgers, scraped game-data lookups. SQLite, Playwright, PM2 on a cloud droplet, automated integrity-checked backups, config validation that fails fast at boot.
Eleven seasons of content cadence — a new custom world, ruleset and patch notes every cycle. Ten recurring live event formats built by hand in-engine and streamed. Roughly twenty volunteer admins recruited, trained and managed across four game communities.
Thousands of players. A Discord sustained at Level 3 by boosts players paid for voluntarily. A store averaging ~$5K a month, peaking at $11K. A brand sponsorship secured by simply asking. And roughly 650 people still in the Discord years after the servers came down.
A few things we built got picked up by other server communities — the roaming PvP wave, our Discord structure, the store model, the map designs, our server configurations, and a workaround we came up with when our host broke in-game maps and couldn't fix them. New server owners used to ask us for our settings.
We closed it when the base game deteriorated past the point where I felt right charging players for it. Full case study →
The faction leadership system had a mutiny channel, so an elected Pirate Lord could be removed by the people who elected them. War declarations were restricted to weekends, because raiding someone's base while they're at work is how you lose a playerbase.
Four years later, in a completely different game and a completely different codebase, the clan resource tracker holds gold pledges as pending until they're verified, and keeps the donor list intact so people can be repaid if the goal is abandoned.
Same instinct both times, without really planning it that way. I build things for real people with real lives, who need to be able to trust what they're putting time into. Looking back, that's the thread through most of what I've made.
I'm looking for contract or part-time work to start, remote. I have around thirty hours a week available and I'd rather prove useful on a small piece of work than talk about a big one.
I've been a union ironworker since 2004 and in management for over ten years — foreman, general foreman and site superintendent — and for the last three years estimating and project managing as a Structural Division Lead. A decade of getting complex work delivered on deadline with crews depending on me, and four years running a game community that people paid to be part of. Those turn out to be more similar than they sound.
If you're building a persistent multiplayer game and the community side is outgrowing what you can support, that's the kind of work I've spent four years doing. Happy to start with something small and see if it's useful.