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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.

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 8/6/26.

General Status

I'm tired!!!!

Work's been plugging away and I've had a few fun trips lately (I'm toying around with the idea of making a little post with some pictures I took on my travels, but we'll see), but I've been way too tired lately to get a lot of work done on my personal game/movie.

Okay, now that I'm thinking about it, that's actually not completely true. I did finish a first draft of a script for the game/movie (I gotta find a better thing to call it) that clocks in at right around 60 pages, so that has been accomplished. Honestly, though, I wrote most of it in just a few days and have otherwise not gotten much done in the past couple months.

I'm hoping to get my sleep schedule set right soon, though, which will get me more energy to do work, and I'm finally making headway on some IK stuff that's been irritating me. Specifically, I've been struggling with how to dynamically make fingers grab objects. I've been fighting against some generic chain-IK solvers, but have decided that I'm just going to do a fully bespoke approach. Luckily fingers have really specific functions, so I think I'll be able to basically two a sort of glorified two-bone IK system that treats the last two knuckles in the finger as one "bone" for IK purposes that are always rotated the same amount. Then I can just use normal two-bone IK logic to solve finger placement and rotation.

The real problem I was running into was that chain IK does WAY too much for fingers and getting the fingers to actually reliably place where they were supposed to without any incorrect deformations was basically impossible with something like FABRIK. A more precise, bespoke solution, though, should let me do what I need to without issue. (It's also waaayyyy more performant.)

Once I have gripping done, I can get started on some more environmental systems that will hopefully give my scenes more life. I'm worried that I'm slowly working my way into immersive sim territory but maybe that's just the end-state for all systems-minded developers. I'm going to choose to not worry about that for now. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯