ABOUT

James Bates is a veteran survivor of both the IT and Esports coaching industry but has always had passions that led him elsewhere. His fanatic love for games of strategy broadly and TCGs specifically drove him to design ad-hoc card games and custom M:tG sets since the time he was in grade school. It was tabletop roleplaying games where he found his first early love, however, and the blend of mechanical and narrative customization offered by them has all but monopolized his imagination ever since.

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As a game designer, James chases two burning passions. Firstly, he loves to collaboratively build narratives that not only lend depth to a game's world but which also help influence how the player views their own world. Secondly, he loves to design deep and engaging game systems which always have one thing in common: a surfeit of player choices. There's no game, he believes, which cannot be bettered by giving the player more options to succeed -- or, should they choose poorly, fail -- and that includes untraditional genres like rhythm games and visual novels.