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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.

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 6/15/26.

General Status

I moved (again)!

I just moved into a new apartment in Portland so I could be more in the city and not trapped out in the country, which is a huge upgrade! It also means, however, that I continue to get basically no meaningful work done.

I had PIGCON a couple of weeks ago and met some local Portland devs and sold FOUR DVD-ROM copies of BYTE, so that's pretty cool. I also started a new job at the beginning of June, all of which is really combining to block me from actually getting work done on my cinematics system. PIGCON will feature in the June issue of Whale Watching Quarterly, which I'll hopefully get going on soon.

Now that I'm set up in the new apartment, though, I think I'll be able to get back to it and start getting good work done again. (Although it seems that my keyboard is about to finally give out so that's another problem I'm going to have to solve.)

I've determined that my new game is actually NOT going to be a game, but rather a real-time movie. I've decided that my artform is "real-time processing" and the systems I'm working on right now are all related to real-time cinematics, so I think that making a real-time movie will be a good way to stretch my legs in this space. We'll see where the roads take me, though.