Ever thought you might have what it takes to run a commercial MUD? Here's your chance!
We're looking to bring on a new Producer for Starmourn, our Sci-Fi MUD. In this position, you would be responsible for operating Starmourn. We have a planned development roadmap, but you will be able to adjust that to your tastes and are generally free to run and develop the game as you judge best. There's always some cooperation on certain things with the rest of Iron Realms but that's mostly around things like our Nexus client, monthly coordinated promotions, and some common backend systems involving things like real-money payments.
IRE producers manage a few other staff, between full-time and part-time, as well as community volunteers. You'd be the visible face of the MUD to the players, and so you'll need to have thick skin and not mind or, ideally, enjoy communicating with your players.
This is a good position for someone who wants to devote themselves to MUDs professionally.
The ideal Producer for Starmourn (we don't expect to find a perfect candidate though, to be clear) would:
- Be currently running a significant MUD with 30+ players simultaneously online at peak. We realize this narrows the field a lot, so this is really more of a shoot-for-the-moon situation. As before, we don't expect to find the perfect candidate, and this is quite possibly the criteria we'll have to compromise on, a lot. If you don't run a MUD, you'll definitely need to be someone who is into MUDs. If you stopped playing or working on them years ago, we're not interested, sorry.
- Minimally, you're going to need to have substantial experience being part of an admin team on a MUD with players, whether commercial or non-commercial.
- Be a fan of MUDs. That doesn't mean you played them for 2 months six years ago.
- Be a coder. You do not need to be an expert Starmourn has a dedicated coding staff but a producer who isn't comfortable coding will not fit into this position. You don't need to be an engineer on the level Google hires, but you do need to be familiar with and decent at programming in vaguely C-like languages.
- Be a creative and disciplined thinker. You will be the chief creative force in the continued development of Starmourn. Your ability to create game design systems not simply spew out ideas, which literally anybody can do is crucial to your ability to do this job well. You need to be able to document designs for a team to be able to work from. If through If you make it to the final round of interviews, you'll be given a game design test that'll require you (not on the spot) to design a system with goal X and attributes X, Y, and Z.
- Be a people person. This is very important in two significant ways; you're managing other human beings and you're communicating daily with the players.
- Be self-motivated. This is literally the opposite of a job where you'd be micromanaged. You'll be asked to do things occasionally, like create small routines on Starmourn that are required for a new feature for our Nexus client or something similar, but if you're the kind of person who likes to be given a list of stuff and then work through that list, this is not the position for you. Almost all of the time, you'll be determining who, including yourself, works on what, as well as whatever that what' is. You'll also be working from home, as Iron Realms has no central office. As a result, we don't care where you live, and we won't be telling you what hours you have to work - though we expect you to work hard. We have a weekly all-hands meeting on Slack once a week, and you will meet with the company president once or twice a week, but those are typically the only mandated from Iron Realms management in terms of be here now.'
- Be willing to devote yourself to this. This one's non-negotiable. This needs to be the focus of your professional life. There's no way you can do it while having a full-time job or while going to school full-time. In the case of part-time positions or part-time school, it's potentially possible, but that's not a plus from our perspective.
- Be familiar with Starmourn or even other IRE MUDs. This would be great, but it's definitely not a firm requirement. Starmourn is a new game, so we understand if you don't have much experience with it. It would make the ramp-up period much shorter though.
- Compensation is based on the candidate and their qualifications here but were you to get the position, expect around $36k base with bonuses based on game performance. Realistically, this is probably not a great position for someone living in a high-cost area like Manhattan, San Francisco, or London, but for someone in an area without that kind of crazy cost-of-living who loves MUDs, it could be a really good long-term.
If you think you might be able a good candidate:
Send an email to resumes@ironrealms.com with the subject line "Starmourn Producer". And seriously, if you can't get this right, we just delete your email, because come on, what the hell? 🙂
The email should include:
- Your name.
- Your resume.
- Where you live (city, country).
- What's your MUD experience (if not in your resume), as a player and/or as an admin. This is really important. If you don't have a good answer here, it's not worth applying. We only hire people who are actively into MUDs.
- What's your coding experience, if not included in your resume?
- What experience do you have designing game systems (if not in your resume)?
- Why do you want to be Starmourn's producer?
- Tell us anything else that you think would make us feel like you're someone who could manage Starmourn.
