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I’m James Martini (they/them), a game designer and writer from Portland, Oregon!

I'm a solo developer with a BFA in Game Design from NYU's Game Center. I have been making games for nine years and have worked professionally in the games industry for over five years, most recently as a QA tester for Major League Baseball's Gaming and VR department.

My first commercial game, BYTE released in October, 2025, and I have been building tools for my next game in Godot since.

Take a look at the featured pages here or use the nav bar to poke around as you please!

Featured Page

BYTE

To live for all eternity is hard. To love for all eternity is even harder.

BYTE is a tactics-RPG/visual novel from developer James Martini that adapts the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker, examining themes of queerness, technology, desire, and more.

You Can See Everything - Review

You know it's bad when Nathan Fielder looks like the normal one.

Whale Watching Quarterly: September 2026

The God of the Machine

It actually pains me that I let myself write about AI (barf). Oh well.

Whale Watching Quarterly: June 2026

The vampire Lestat: A real guy

I'm a little obsessed with Lestat.

The new and improved jamesmartini.me

Wow, a new website!!

Get introduced to the new version of jamesmartini.me and learn why I left Wordpress.com in favor of making my website on my own.

I also outline the sitemap and detail what fun stuff you can find on this site!

Whale Watching Quarterly: March 2026

I <3 Games That Aren't Games

See my opinions on Harakiri, Stake Story, and why I love games that aren't games (like Death Stranding)!

Whale Watching Quarterly: January 2026

2026: The Year of Yassai Mossai 2003

Come learn about my favorite boys in the world, the Kisarazu Cats Eye!!!!!!

Also I talk about Taiko no Tatsujin,

James, now!

This is a live page that is upated periodically with what I'm up to.

This page was last updated on 11/6/26.

General Status

As I would hope from the best month of the year, I had an extremely busy October, packed with events. I opened the month by seeing MICHAEL DIAMOND LIVE (I would say the greatest lyricist of all time). I SAW A BEASTIE BOY LIVE. I cannot express how huge that was for me personally. Then it was my birthday and on my birthday weekend I showed BYTE at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo. This was, genuinely the best showcase I've ever had in my life. People were into the game, I sold some DVDs, and I autographed a middle schooler's sticker (he had a Weird Al t-shirt so you know he's a cool middle schooler). I then had assorted Halloween-related events and saw both new Lance Oppenheim movies, and finished out the month by seeing My Chemical Romance twice at the Hollywood Bowl. (Gerard <3)

Work-wise, this means I haven't gotten quite as much work done. Still, I have gotten my IK-controllers in a good place and started a second pass on my script. Hopefully within the next couple of weeks I'll have a script that I feel is in a good place and then I'll get started actually putting some scenes together. OH! I just remembered I actually basically lost a week at the start of October working out my character creation pipeline. I got more comfortable with CharMorph, the Blender Hair Tool, and clothes sculpting but most importantly, I ACTUALLY LEARNED HOW TO CREATE MATERIALS. I got into the material nodes for the first real time and learned how to combine all the clothes materials into one material using masks and then exporting the final results to a new PBR material. This is huge for me and was the last big piece I hadn't figured out in my pipeline.

I'm feeling good with where I'm at but am really excited to actually start MAKING stuff real soon.