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.
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BYTE
itch.io link Wishlist BYTE on Steam Write your vows in blood! Estimated demo play time: ~2 hours BYTE is a tactics RPG that adapts the classic novel Dracula, by Bram Stoker, with an emphasis on the themes of queerness and technology.You play as Jonathan Harker, Dracula’s real estate agent, completing work tasks while exploring the
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Yvain and Gawain: The Game
Play it on itch right now! Yvain and Gawain: The Game is a small tactics-RPG based on the story Yvain, the Knight of the Lion, by the medieval French writer Chrétien de Troyes. The game explores the moment that two best friends, Yvain and Gawain, must fight each other in order to defend the honor
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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
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BYTE Devlog 9/29/23: Week 2 Complete
BIG WEEK IN BYTE! This week in BYTE my goal was to complete the second week of content, introducing Jonathan (and the player) to Keons, Dracula’s friend, and getting the player to unlock the chapel. And, well, MEET KEONS Keons is Dracula’s friend and a priest at the local church. Dracula enlists his help to
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BYTE Devlog 9/22/23: Back-end and narrative
X! M! L! X! M! L! As if I’m back in high school, this week I started out by doing a bunch of work in XML. I needed a way of tracking which characters are in which scenes on which days and where they go, so I decided to drag a rabbit out of my
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BYTE Devlog 9/18/23: Making it all work again
Admittedly, I’ve had a very busy week so I don’t have a ton to show visually (which is why I’m just reusing images from last week’s preview), but I did manage to get a lot of housekeeping/testing tasks sorted out. The main focus of this week was getting the game to work with the new
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BYTE Round 2: Preview and Goals
IT’S BYTE TIME BABY!!!!!!!!!!! Welcome back to Detroit, Oregon, home of my childhood summer memories. On my way to Sisters, Oregon, we would stop here at the High Mountain Grocery and I would inevitably get some chips, a Mountain Dew, and, of course, a pepperoni stick. Oh, yeah, also Dracula lives here. It’s been a
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BYTE Devlog #12: Content complete
Let’s take one more look at the backlog: Because I would like to have the Week 1 Demo fully completed by May 1, I wanted to make sure that I had all of the major content in the game for this week. It was a bit of a crunch but I got it all done.
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BYTE Devlog #11: Gothic props and literature
The two major elements going into this week, as I approach the end of the semester, were to create some Gothic props and architecture for the scenes to make it more generally Dracula and to also start creating the final battle, with the dialogue and the battle setup. The first of the two was the
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BYTE Devlog #10: What didn’t I do!
Let’s take a look at the backlog for this week: Let’s just say that I had a lot of free time this weekend and spent basically all of it working on BYTE. For starters, the UI wound up being a major task for this week. I wanted to get to work on the second battle
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BYTE Devlog #9: Sitting down
The majority of this week’s work was, admittedly, not spent doing any of the things that I said I would do but instead spent trying to create a system for my characters to sit down. I keep writing scenes where I imagine characters sitting down and talking (in particular, all the scenes of Jonathan working),
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BYTE Devlog #8: Wrapping up some pieces
This past week on BYTE, I did a lot of miscellaneous little fixes and quality-of-life improvements to get the game up and running for the next section of content. First, I made a lot of structural changes to the battle system to try and prepare it for actual integration into the rest of the game.
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BYTE Devlog #7: Creating some models
The past two weeks were mostly spent creating and animating models for the game. The first model I made was the model for Jonathan. When thinking about creating the model for Jonathan I wanted to make the suit fit like a suit from the ’80s, while also making the fit sort of evocative of what
James Martini 