People often ask me what my job is. The pat answer is that I’m the CEO and Creative Director of a small online games company. Most people kind of look at me and then ask, “Yes, but what is it you do?” I’m going to try to give an answer to that in this post, having been inspired by a post Brian Green wrote recently entitled, “What is a game designer?” In it, Brian runs down what a game designer should expect to do day-to-day (organize, communicate, champion ideas, etc) and what a game designer should not expect to do (actually designing the high-level game concept). I thought I’d take a similar approach to describing my job.

What My Job Isn’t

It’s probably easier to start off talking about what I don’t do than what I do, since I’m involved a wide range of activities. One thing I do very little of these days is coding. I wrote most of the code for Achaea early on, but it’s been about 18 months since I’ve done much of that. I was entirely self-taught, and am not particularly good (though the code worked well enough not being written well) nor do I have a wide-range of knowledge. If it doesn’t involve using our Rapture engine to write a text MUD, I don’t know how to write it.

My job also does not involve producing graphical or audio assets. Although I’m acting as both Art Director and Audio Director on Earth Eternal, I don’t have the knowledge or the skills (or the time) to actually create 3d models, animations, FX, or music.

What My Job Is

This is best summed up as ‘everything else.’ I think I touch almost every other aspect of developing our games. This has its upsides, and it has its downsides. One of the major drawbacks is that I have so many things to do in so many different areas (design, production, business, marketing, management, etc) that it can be hard to find the uninterrupted chunks of time that I find I need in order to be a productive designer.

First and foremost though, I have to keep everything running. I liason with the producers of the various text MUDs to keep tabs on what they’re up to (they have almost complete freedom to design and develop as they think is best), I deal with our lawyers and accountants, our merchant bank, our merchant processor, our hosting company, handle most of the marketing (and I’m not very good at it either) and advertising, make sure the bills get paid, and so on. I also make a point of personally handling the real-money side of the customer service for Achaea. Since all fifteen of us work remotely, we have regular meetings, either online in one of our games, or via Skype. We have an Earth Eternal meeting every weekday, and text MUD meetings at least weekly.

That all takes up time, but then I have to leave room for working specifically on Earth Eternal, which means I work incessantly these days. Until this weekend, when a volunteer intern started assisting, I have been doing all of the writing for EE myself. I do all the game design too, though I frequently involve both Chris Kohnert (our CTO, and the lead engineer) and Martin Best (a bit of a jack-of-all trades, and in charge of EE’s client) in high level discussions of design. I spent a good portion of this weekend setting up the newly-opened forums for Earth Eternal and then dealing with subsequently being slammed by unexpectedly high traffic to them.

After I’m done with this post, I’ll be updating the EE website and then working on the list of sound effects we need produced, as our music is getting close to done. After that it’s onto today’s art and approving it or sending it back for corrections. Later this week I’ll be working with Chris and Martin to update our complete development schedule to reflect what’s ahead and what’s behind schedule, and I have a GDC presentation to do this week as well. Stratics is sending over an interview that I’ll devote some time to, and I’ve got to deal with closing up our final round of investment for EE. Of course, it’s tax season now too, which means spending some time coordinating with the accountants and probably the lawyer.

Basically, I just keep things rolling, and in the gaps I work on EE’s design. It’s a fairly harried lifestyle, particularly as I work at home, which means I’m always “at the office.” For the last 6 months or so, the work has been pretty non-stop. I get up, read the paper, and am usually working 20 minutes after getting up, often not stopping until bedtime except to go for a hike for an hour or so and cook dinner for me and Eileen.

Why I Love My Job

Occasionally, I’m jealous of people who get to come home from work and not think about it until they’re at work again. That has a lot of appeal when I realize that I’ve done nothing but think about work for the past 3 days, or when I’m at a meeting on Saturday afternoon instead of out mountain biking or hiking.

Most of the time, however, I’m profoundly grateful to be able to do what I do. I get to make games, and I get to do it without anyone telling me, “Sorry, marketing doesn’t think that will play well with the Walmart crowd.” Iron Realms is stable and growing (just completed our ninth consecutive year of double digit growth) so the extreme levels of anxiety about the future that I used to experience 6 or 7 years ago have mainly disappeared, or at least been replaced by similar levels of anxiety about whether Earth Eternal will fly or not. The nice thing, however, is that we’re not taking on any debt to build Earth Eternal, so even if it fails (which I think is unlikely), Iron Realms will just happily motor onwards.

The single thing I’m most grateful for, though, is the ability to be the high-level designer. That’s my favorite part of virtual world design (also the easiest in a certain way), and as Brian noted in his blog post, it’s not something most designers get to do. It wouldn’t be possible without the loyal fans who have stuck by us for the past decade and allowed us to remain independent, so here’s a shout out to them: You rock. I hope we can continue to be worthy of your patronage.