Welcome

About me!

My name is James Justice and I am a Game Designer/Developer. I specialize in anything Unity whether it be Unity2D, Unity 3D, and Unity OpenXR. I love making levels in games that draws the player in and keeps them engaged, whether it be by immersion in the level, or engagement in the story.Throughout my design experiences, I've found that What I love most when sculpting the game and the levels that reside within, is making it visually pleasing. I am passionate when it comes to making a good, memorable aesthetic that draws the player in and keeps them engaged, all while fitting in with the games theme and core pillars.Having been in Unity for the past 6 years, I have been able to experiment with particle systems, post-processing, lighting, animations, visual scripting, and more! I'm all about creating beautiful, immersive environments while keeping things optimized for the player's full enjoyment.

Tools I KNOW

Perforce (P4V)
Unity2D
Unity3D
Unity OpenXR
Bolt (Unity Visual Scripting)
Visual Studios (C#)
Maya
Aseprite
Slack
Figma
Adobe Photoshop
HacknPlan
Trello
Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Word
Microsoft PowerPoint
Microsoft Outlook
Microsoft Teams
Google Forms
Google Docs
Google Sheets
Itch.io

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CHRONICLES: YAMATO TAKERU
(SOLO PROJECT)

Chronicles is a game made within the time span of roughly 7 months. Everything in the game aside from the audio and text font was all made by me. This game follows the Japanese Chronicles accurately according to what was written. Chronicles gave me the ability to create multiple different levels with a ton of different lighting and post-processing effects, allowing for a variety of environments. This game was built in Unity 3D and all the textures were made with Adobe Photoshop. All models were made in Autodesk Maya.Throughout making this game, it had shown me things such as all documentation (LDD, GDD, Asset Lists, etc.) as well as simple sketches and just how far they can take you if done correctly. This game has helped my ability to incorporate story and narrative within a playable game, making it something that the player is able to immerse themselves in. Everything from the main theme, to the footsteps, and even the dirt textures and leaf shapes were all taken into consideration not just for visuals, but also when it came to how this would all help improve the gameplay experience for the player.

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PROJECT: REVARIA
(SOLO PROJECT)

Project Revaria is a passion project I started working on after becoming comfortable with Unity's OpenXR Plugin and XR Interaction Toolkit. Currently in it's early stages of development, I have created everything for the game so far besides most of the artwork.This game will play like a RogueLite with some adventuring aspects in it. Being a RogueLite, I want to keep the areas hand-crafted so for the dungeons, I will be making multiple floors and layouts which will allow me to do a lot of fun experiments with the level design in the game.Throughout making this game, I have learned more and more about Unity's OpenXR, Unity's XR Interaction Toolkit, VR interactions with things such as grabbing, UI, hitboxes, sockets, and more. The more I add to this project, the more I find out about how much VR can really do.

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COSMENDER
(LEVEL & CONTENT DESIGNER)

Cosmender was a game that I, along with 7 other students made in our school's game jam. We had 2 days to create a game with the theme of "Sparkle". First and foremost, the other game designer and I both were in complete agreement when it came to the team getting to know each other before even touching on the game's idea. And so we had a group meeting where we were able to understand each other's strengths and weaknesses.This is undoubtedly what helped us make something so great in such a short amount of time. Once getting a solid idea for the game, I then took to pencil and paper and began structuring the layout of the map while getting input from the other designer every little bit.After taking into account the game's loop, core pillars, and how the player would initially react to getting tossed in the game, I was able to get a solid map sketched out and sent to the artists. I then proceeded to grey box, import models and textures, build materials in Unity, apply code to the player, interactables, make particle systems, and overall assemble the whole project.Once the project was done, this game got almost unanimous 10's across the board from the other students, and also impressed the class a year above us. This game was made in the Unity3D engine. All models provided by art students were made in Maya, along with texturing in Adobe Photoshop.

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DECIQUEST REMASTERED
(PRODUCER & LEAD DESIGNER)

DeciQuest Remastered is a passion project inspired by games I had grown up with. This game was made in about a month with a team of 3. In this game, I was the developer, level designer, artist, and programmer. In my team of 4, the other 3 were just starting out and because of that, they were only comfortable working on art for the game.That being said, I gave them tasks of certain art that had to be done by a certain time frame and as they worked those out, I began the coding and implementation into Unity. After the initial game was finished, I then touched it up about 6 months later with a few friends who had made some new art assets for the game, and now look visually more pleasing. The game was made in Unity2D and all art was done on an online website called Pixilart.

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THE SHY TURTLE
(SOLO PROJECT)

This game was made for a game jam that lasted roughly 2 and a half days. I, along with the other contestants were all given the task of making a game that fits best with the given music. And so when I got the music, I listened to it over and over again until I just about had it memorized. I then made multiple prototypes throughout the first 70% of the game jam, however, I wasn't fond of any. It was then when I made a bunny image, that my friend teased me about it looking like a turtle.We then joked around for a bit about it and then it popped into my head, a game about a self-conscious turtle. This game in my head would be cute but also have a deeper meaning. And so I began to create it in the few hours I had left. I recolored some assets from the earlier prototypes and slapped them into the game and soon enough the game was finished.Throughout this game the player may view it however they would like to. Is this a shy turtle? Is this turtle playing hide and seek with me? Is this my pet turtle? All these questions allow for the player to form their own mental image of what the games narrative is like, allowing for a more personal experience during gameplay. The game was made in Unity2D and the assets were made online using Pixilart.

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VESTIGE
(LEAD LEVEL DESIGNER)

Vestige is a project that took place during my school's minor production. During this 9 week development process, I worked with the producer, artists, and programmers to ensure that this game had the looks, functionality, and immersion I was looking to give the player.
Throughout the development of the game, I had taken inspiration not only from popular games such as red dead redemption but from real-life nature as well. Given that this was a psychological thriller game, I shaped each environment to fit the scenery and the mental state of the player or monster inhabiting the domain. The Maturnal for example lives in a mountainous region, however, the maternal also represents grief.
To show this, I sculpted the mountain based on numerous references and then played into the theme by making the soul (object player needs to beat domain) held within a cradle surrounded by a picket fence. This is to represent the ideal life that the main character was hoping to have, but was never able to achieve.

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THE CURSE OF FAFNIR
(SOLO PROJECT)

The Curse of Fafnir is a game based on Norse Mythology. I heard about the curse of Fafnir and it really piqued my interest, so I began to create a game about it. At the time I had been playing a lot of Binding of Isaac, so I decided to go with a dungeon crawler-type game. In this game, I went to the Unity asset store and purchased the dungeon tileset, along with 2d sprites.Although I purchased the sprites, I had to manually go in and create 4 frame loopable animations for each one I chose to use. This took some time and effort to get it all to match and look indifferent to the other animations, however, once the animations were done, it had looked amazing.In this game, I hand-animated sprites, wrote all of the code (health bars, combat, UI, etc.), worked with post-processing, and assembled the game in Unity2D. The art assets were animated through a steam app called Aseprite.