I’m James Martini, a game designer and writer. This website features all of my work.
Check out the links below to see some selected works and learn about me. Below the list are all of the posts on the site. Feel free to use the categories in the top bar to sort by the kind of work you want to see.
-
Apricot and Fern
Itch.io link In Apricot and Fern, have a relaxing evening exploring this cute cafe nestled deep in the woods. Talk to the patrons, who love to spend their time lounging, playing games, and chit-chatting the night away. Technology Timeframe 5 months Role Sole developer
-
BYTE Devlog #1.1: White RenderTexture in RenderFeature when creating Windows build
When creating the Windows build for my BYTE demo, I ran into a very sticky issue where, for some reason, the windows build displayed this pink screen instead of the correctly dithered scene from the Unity Editor. As you can see in the image, the UI does correctly display on top of the pink screen, […]
-
BYTE Devlog #1: The visual demo
Video Link BYTE is a tactics game based on Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula that re-imagines the story in the 1980s, at the dawn of the digital age. It will adapt the themes of Dracula to a new, modern era, examining what it would mean for Dracula to interface with computers and the internet. This visual […]
-
Art and Death in W.B. Yeats’ The Tower
-
Overcoming the Suburban Nightmare in Donnie Darko
-
The Extension of “Camp” and the Play-Element in “The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt”
-
The Mariner, Lost then Found
(or, “The Lost Mariner, Found”) The Lady I met while lost at sea Held my hand as She tore my vessel in two. As a child I always floated in water, But suddenly, for the first time in my life, I sank. I felt myself dissolve as I lost myself in Her. No longer weighed […]
-
Humanity in Death: Twenty One Pilots and Yeats
September 26, 2021, Denver, Colorado (look at me finally publishing articles over a year after I write them): You know the drill: Twenty One Pilots is touring again, which means that my borderline unhealthy obsession with Tyler Joseph as an artist has come back with force and vigor. For whatever reason, nothing gets me going […]
-
Capturing Randy: Finding American myth by drawing Randy Johnson
Meeting Randy: Like many of the world’s young people, long, uninteresting Zoom classes populate my days and I need something to occupy my time. Luckily for me, I typically have a notebook in front of me so I do what any sensible young person would do: sketch pictures of MLB Hall of Fame pitcher Randy […]
-
Why are there so many Twin Peaks clones in video games?
Everyone loves David Lynch and his strange brain, but apparently, no one loves him more than video game writers do. We can’t get through a year nowadays without at least one clear David Lynch homage sliding its way onto the release calendar. Some companies, like French developer Dontnod, have even created entire brands around it, […]
-
The Pythagoras Parable
Introduction: The following short story is loosely based on a legend surrounding Hippasus, a Pythagorean philosopher (though he most likely lived about a century after Pythagoras, despite how I wrote the story), who supposedly discovered the existence of irrational numbers, which challenged the Pythagorean belief in a rational world (all numbers can be represented as […]