Home

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.

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 5/7/26.

General Status

I'm fully back in Portland and ready to go again, so I've been hard at work on a couple of things. Firstly, I'm working on expanding out the camera system in my new game to have more dynamic cameras that can track targets and move around on their own. This is going to be another big step in having a cutscene system that can operate mostly based on general direction without me needing to animate things. Right now, the thing I've been animating the most have been cameras, but this will really cut down on that as well.

I'm also putting together a DVD-ROM release for BYTE. This will include the DVD-ROM, a soundtrack CD, and a game manual. I want this ready for the end of the month bnecause I'm showing BYTE at PIGCON and want to be able to tell people about it.

I've been gaming about as much as I ever have as well. Right now I'm playing through the Apollo Justice trilogy and Nier: Automata, in addition to the 3DS games I've been on for a few weeks. Ideally, I'll finish up Apollo Justice soon and I'm really losing steam on Nier, but I'm going to try and push through the third playthrough because I know that that's technically the end.

Turns out when I don't have a real job and don't need to spend almost two hours commuting every day I have a lot of time on my hands!