When I decided I wanted to do a “book club”, I was imagining that I would make one or two posts a month and end the year with something like 15 or 20 things to look back on. Here we are, nearing the end of September, and I’m on issue…uh…four. There are several reasons for why this has not panned out how I had expected. To name a couple quickly, I have been less invested in writing about the art that I engage with. I have watched a lot more movies this year and, while I haven’t played that many games, I have played all of the Metal Gear Solid games and started Death Stranding, but I just haven’t felt that motivated to write about this stuff for the most part.1 (We will get to Metal Gear Solid, but I’ve been busy.) What I have written, I’ve also sat on for quite a while. I sat on both my Pierre post and my Session post for close to two months each, which is four months total. That’s a third of the year.
More than any of this, though, these posts have been wildly delayed by one thing in particular: BYTE.
Anyone who knows me knows that for the past three and a half years or so, I have been working on a tactics RPG/visual novel based on Dracula, called BYTE. Finally, after first developing the concept for the game in late spring/early summer 2022 and working on it ever since, I am releasing BYTE on October 1st, 2025.
As part of an exercise I would like to go through to reflect on BYTE and look at everything I’ve done for it, BYTE is the feature of today’s book club issue. I’m going to break this up into a few parts, some of which will resemble how I’ve written about the other things pretty closely, some of which will be more retrospective about my process and experience working on the game.
Wow, that’s like a long time!
Right?
BYTE actually started quite a long way before even that 2022 date I just said. Back in 2018, in high school, shortly after the release of Twenty One Pilots’ album Trench, I wrote out a cute little concept for a TOP fan-game based on the lore that they set up for that album. The game would have had the player take the role of Clancy, the main character in their story and escape from Dema, the city he is trapped in, then adventuring through Trench.
I had this idea at a time where I barely knew anything about game development at all. I had pretty decent programming skills and had used Unity before, but the actual logistics of making a full, finished game were something I was completely unfamiliar with. I correctly identified, however, that the problem largely stemmed from my lack of an end goal. I didn’t have a project.
Many will tell you that when starting out as a game developer, you should not start with whole projects and instead do little activities. Make a mechanic. Make a system. Make an environment. Things like that. That, probably, is sound advice, but I do think that having something to work towards helps quite a bit. After all, what mechanics should you make? I thought that developing out a concept of a complete game would give me a clearer picture of what I should actually be working on.
After writing out my concept, though, I never wound up working on it. I don’t totally remember why. I probably got busy with college applications or something.
Speaking of, just a year later, I got accepted into NYU’s Game Design program.
I started studying Game Design in August of 2020 (cool time to move to NYC, I know!), and this project stayed floating around in my brain. During the year and a half between having my Dema game idea and actually starting college, I had some other ideas as well that I wrote down but never worked on. Specifically, I got a real intense desire to make a turn-based RPG. This probably stemmed partially from my newfound passion for the Persona series, and also from my impression that turn-based RPGs are very interface-driven, and my strongest background was in software development, not really computer science, so a game that resembled a more traditional computer program, with less physics and complex math-based systems seemed very approachable.
Over the first year and a half or so in school, I just did the schoolwork assigned to me. I still didn’t really have the knowledge necessary to make more than the small projects that I got guided through in class, but as time marched on, I got more comfortable with my skills and interests. In the first semester of my sophomore year, I worked on a Pokemon clone and actually dragged out my Dema game for a design project because I was stumped for any other ideas. When doing the project, I took out all the references to Twenty One Pilots because I was too afraid of looking cringe at the time and I would end up really not liking what I presented, largely because I just phoned the whole thing. It did, however, bring that project back up fresh in my mind and I started to think of it as a project that I could actually make.
This got me thinking about what I would want it to look like. I realized pretty quickly that I didn’t want the game to have anything to do with Twenty One Pilots, because if I wanted to release the game commercially at all, that just wouldn’t do me any favors.
So, how do I find a framing for this concept if I don’t have the explanation of Dema?
At the time, I was listening to a lot of Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge by My Chemical Romance and Dracula Daily had just started up. Dracula Daily is a newsletter that sends out the various letters and journal entries from Dracula on the days that they’re dated from, to emulate the experience of Dracula in real-time. I have loved Dracula since I read it in high school so I was pretty diligent the first time around with it, because I loved the idea of getting to experience the book in a different way.
So picture me, on the subway, listening to Revenge, and reading the Dracula Daily on one of the first days of the novel. It all comes together: it’s a Dracula game.
Jonathan spends like half the novel trying to escape from Dracula’s castle, so instead of being about Clancy escaping from Dema, it’s just Jonathan’s deal.
Right around when I had this idea, I started working for the IT desk at one of NYU’s schools. Working IT for a university in the summer means that they basically just pay you to sit in a cubicle and watch YouTube. So this was a perfect time to flesh out my Dracula idea into a full game. I quit the job pretty quickly but I had enough time to write out the full plot idea, figure out how I’d compress the novel’s story into just the one location, and start coming up with some of the basic systems.
The next semester (first semester of junior year), I took two different classes purely for the purpose of working on the game. One was a 3D studio class where I started concepting the visuals of the game and the other was a game narrative class where I finished up some of the core narrative concepts for the game. After that, for each of my last three semesters, I took a project studio class where I just worked on BYTE. (The title BYTE actually came from the professor for that 3D class. After I presented my concept a month or so in, he just went, “You know what this game needs to be called, right? BYTE!” Thanks, Carl.)
This means that over the final two years of college, I took five different classes purely for the purpose of working on BYTE.
I spent a ton of time working on this game. Both during school, and after, working full time, I probably spent generally 10-15 hours a week working on BYTE, but would get up to 30-40 or even more if I got on a roll with something. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but mind you I also, like, have a life with a job and classes and friends and a fiance and stuff. 40 hours in a single week working on your stupid Dracula game is a lot more when you’ve got all that going on too. (The 40-hour week I’m thinking of specifically was actually Thanksgiving week and I was sick. I just got really into some UI stuff I was doing.)
To conceptualize how things have changed in my life since I first had the Dema game idea in 2018, let’s look at a few examples:
Dema is done: Since Twenty One Pilots released Trench in 2018, they have released three more albums, all in the same lore world as Trench. Not just that, though, their most recent, Breach, from just earlier this month, ends the Trench lore. It took me longer to make BYTE than it took Tyler Joseph to make four albums as part of one story. (As a side note, it’s surreal that Breach came out literally like three weeks before BYTE. I’ve been planning a 10/1/25 release for almost two years.)
I like different things: A lot of BYTE stems from my passion for the Persona series, specifically Persona 5. In the time since I started BYTE in mid-2022, here are some other games I’ve played:
Persona 3, Persona 4, Shin Megami Tensei IV, SMT V, Metaphor Re:Fantazio
The entire Yakuza series (literally every single game)
The entire Metal Gear Solid series (as we just covered, I did that all this year)
I mention these to highlight that in the time I’ve worked on BYTE I moved on from obsessing over Persona to obsessing over Yakuza and then moved on again to obsess over Metal Gear Solid
I MADE A GAME: This is an ability I did not have at the start of 2022 so I think it’s worth highlighting here. That’s fucking crazy.
So, like, is it good, though?
I think so!
The funny thing about BYTE is that I have learned an almost immeasurable amount in the time that I’ve worked on this game.
I say “almost” because while it feels immeasurable, actually BYTE is a pretty perfect measurement of everything I’ve learned since starting BYTE. So in the spirit of that, let’s take a look at some of my favorite things that I’ve done in BYTE.
Narrative
There are really two main aspects of BYTE’s narrative: the system and the story.
The system side of things isn’t really anything to write home about. I used Ink for the main narrative structure and just built a very robust dialogue system in BYTE to properly read from the Ink files, with all the functions set up to trigger how they need to when they need to. (I foolishly left all my Ink functions just in my GameManager script which is probably the single messiest part of the entire project, but it works and it was never worth bothering to fix. Oh well.)
Despite it not being all that impressive, though, my core structure for BYTE’s narrative has made its way into quite literally every single other project I’ve worked on since I made it. Turns out that once you write an Ink reader, it’s way easier to just copy and paste it into everything you do than it is to actually rewrite it bespoke every time.
I also have a cinematics system that I’m really happy with. Again, it’s nothing too incredible, but it lets me have a Yakuza sub-story-level of cinematics in BYTE, which is exactly what I was going for. On that level, I’m actually quite proud.
On the actual story side, though, wow. Did you know that BYTE is right around 86,000 words? Probably not, since it’s not out yet, but that’s a lot of words. That’s well within full-novel range. The original Dracula is about 160,000 words, so I’m only about half as long as Dracula, but when you consider that BYTE is just about half reading (maybe a little over half), I’ve made a game that takes about as long to play as Dracula takes to read, while still having a full novel’s worth of text. That’s impressive.2
Make no mistake, I’ve tried to write a book before and have frankly never even gotten close. I think I’ve gotten up into the 25,000+ word range before, but then I gave up when I got bored of the concept or distracted by something else or otherwise unhappy with my work up to that point. To have, functionally, accidentally written a novel in the process of making a video game is an accomplishment that I do not take lightly. I’ll take this one with me to my grave.
Word count aside, I think the story is good, too. Throughout, I think the writing of BYTE turned out really well, but in particular the scene where you kill the brides and the final day give me chills. I guess the final day is more than just reading (the last moment leaves me speechless every time I play it and there aren’t even words), but I, like, actually wrote a gothic story. I did exactly what I set out to do.
Graphics
For some reason, when I took that 3D studio class in my junior year to concept some visual ideas for BYTE, I got it in my head that I really wanted to learn how to code shaders. I decided that if I ever wanted to make my games look good, I was going to need to understand how shaders worked. Turns out, I was very correct about that, even if none of the actual shader work I did in that class survived.
I don’t remember how I landed on it, but liked the idea of doing a sort of Obra Dinn-style shader for BYTE, so I looked up an Obra Dinn shader tutorial on YouTube and just copied it, trying to understand how it all worked. Almost immediately, I abandoned the outlines and the Bayer matrix projected onto a sphere, partially because they were too complicated for me to understand and partially because I decided I didn’t like them, and I was right to do that. The muddy, hard to make out look of BYTE is such a killer look and I really stand by making a game that’s almost impossible to actually make out fully.
(One time at the Game Center’s Spring Showcase, someone was playing the game and complained about the dither patterns appearing to slide over the top of the meshes. I explained that this is an artifact of screen-space dithering over moving objects, but that some games project the matrix into 3D space to avoid it. She very bluntly told me that I should do that and left. I didn’t change it, and I won’t, but I think about her all the time. I suspect that she’s the only person who will ever complain about that, and I respect her deeply.)
Ultimately, long after I created the original shader in that 3D studio class, I realized that the rendering was still too high-res, and on any resolution 1080p and up, the dithering was too fine to even make out. It was at this point that I started learning about rendering out to render textures and then layering them on top of each other to give myself more control over the final look. I ended up making the default (for anything over 1080p) be rendering the game at half-res and 4:3 aspect ratio, to really lean into the older look of the style. The UI is still rendered at full-res and whatever the default aspect ratio is for clarity.3
This final look is genuinely phenomenal. Almost everyone who has looked at BYTE since I switched over to this new rendering style has commented on, if nothing else, how much they love the visuals of the game. In the end I probably learned more about graphics programming than I did about shaders (although I made plenty of shaders, too), and the end result is gorgeous. More than anything else, I think my ability to create a good-looking final product has increased dramatically since starting BYTE.4
Systems
Before starting BYTE, I probably would have told you that the thing I was best at in game development was gameplay programming. Putting together UI, gameplay systems, and ways of organizing game data was what I knew the best and it’s part of why I leaned toward a turn-based game in the first place. I figured that it was less math and more user-facing systems, which is what I had the most experience with.
Even still, I have grown so much more comfortable with these systems than I was before. One of the bigger things I worked on before BYTE was my aforementioned Pokemon clone. While this thing worked, internally it was a complete disaster. Without going into too much detail, because I didn’t plan anything out well, all of the battle UI was managed from within one giant script. This is, as you might expect, bad practice.
In BYTE, though, I took the time to really consider how I was storing all my data, laying out my UI, and handling my combat structures. I think I developed a pretty robust system for all of it that was really capable of handling all of my ideas. One time, I was showing the game in my project studio class and someone was playing through it a little bit but wasn’t really getting that into it. (To be fair, BYTE demos pretty horribly in more casual settings. It can take 20+ minutes to start getting invested, so in settings where people might only play for 5-10 minutes, they never really develop much interest.) Right when she sat down, though, she started flipping through the pause menu and one of the only things she said the entire time was “whoa, this is a lot of interfaces”.
It is a lot of interfaces and they all work! They’re all cleanly organized! I can add in new things and make modifications easily! I’m very proud of my interfaces.
But, is it art?
Unquestionably, my greatest achievement with BYTE is making a game that I truly believe is a good, well-thought-out work of art.
I have always been enamored by just how much Dracula is about all at once. It’s a book designed from the ground up to play on growing fears among the English upper class around immigration, queerness, STDs, women’s rights, medical science, and more. It was a very forward-looking book that was so invested in what the wealthy and powerful were about to be terrified of that it still feels just as relevant and interesting today. Dracula was about so much all at the same time that it’s hard to find any work of horror after it that wasn’t in some way influenced by it, directly or indirectly.
BYTE might be a little more retrospective, as opposed to Dracula’s prospectiveness, but I still think BYTE manages to engage with the concepts from the novel in ways that genuinely do leave an impression on the player. It inspires questions and ways of looking at the novel that I think most people wouldn’t consider.
A side effect I also didn’t anticipate was that BYTE teaches people what the original novel even is. I didn’t realize how little most people know about Dracula, but apparently I’m doing important work over here. One time at a playtest event, someone asked me how I came up with the idea of Jonathan being a real-estate agent and I had to explain that that’s actually just what the plot of the novel is. Jonathan is a real-estate agent who goes to Dracula’s castle to help him buy land in London. Just a few months ago a friend asked me if I came up with the character of literally Professor Van Helsing and I had to explain that he’s basically the second-most-famous character from the book, after Dracula himself.
I’m an educator, is what I’m saying. Go read Dracula. It’s awesome.
Perhaps the single biggest inspiration for BYTE (maybe even bigger than the novel) is Bram Stoker’s Dracula, by Francis Ford Coppola. I watched this movie in high school when we read the book for class and wow that movie is my favorite movie of all time. It’s incredible. What Bram Stoker’s Dracula understands about the novel is that it was horrific at the time because it pushed boundaries, in particular sexual boundaries, held by the English upper class the book was targeted at. In the process of adapting the novel, Coppola very clearly asked how he could not just adapt the story to screen, but how he could adapt the horror to an audience significantly more accustomed to sexual imagery than late-19th-century England. That’s why Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a sexed-up, horny movie about Gary Oldman transforming from an ugly old monster into a…uh…hot old monster and entering into a willing relationship with Mina. The movie wants to amp up the terror of Jonathan’s fiance being stolen by Dracula.
This specific aspect wasn’t necessarily what I wanted to tackle when making BYTE, but the attitude of transforming the story into something that retained the same horror and intrigue for a modern audience was something that really drove me when making the game. I wanted to make a Dracula for a digital age. I wanted to ask, if Dracula is about the horror of late-19th-century bigotry amplified by new medical philosophy and technology that few people understood, how does that look if you replace medical technology with the internet?
I’m frankly not totally sure that I landed this as well as I could have. There are some lingering aspects of BYTE that feel underbaked to me. For example, I left the blood transfusions in the story, largely unchanged. In hindsight, I should have found a digital replacement for them that would target fears people have around treating illness with computer technology. I also introduced this idea of digital enhancements, both for the vampires and the humans, but I feel like I didn’t quite nail the horror aspect of that concept. I try to approach the grotesqueness of what Dracula, Renfield, and Nyssa do to Arthur, enhancing his vampire abilities with computers, but Jonathan and his company literally inject tiny computers into their bodies that let them wirelessly hack those vampires’ body modifications. That’s grotesque! But I never let that image speak for itself and largely wind up glossing over it as I trudge on through the plot.
Despite all this, though, I am truly, passionately happy with how BYTE turned out. I think that I did a wonderful job of blending Dracula, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Twin Peaks, and more into a package that feels interesting, thought-provoking, and uniquely me.5
Okay…what now?
It’s extremely strange not knowing what I’ll be working on next. Never in my life have I simultaneously felt fully equipped to make a game that I can release as a complete product and not been working on BYTE. That confidence to release a game came way after I started work on this and I don’t know how I’ll approach my next project.
I have some ideas for new games, but my first task will probably be to start working on some new systems and tools that I can use. As I mentioned before, I have grown consumed by Hideo Kojima and his wonderful brain, and playing Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding has fully convinced me that I want to make cinematic games with cutscenes, animation, and visual stories.
When I was in high school deciding what I wanted to do in college, I ultimately had to decide between wanting to make movies and wanting to make games. I had my reasons for going down the games route, but one of the big ones was that I saw games as a space where I could do everything that I wanted to do. Over the years, I have tried my hand at just about every form of art out there, and I love doing it all. Games seemed like the only place where I could do visual art, writing, music, and more all in one go, by myself.
At some point along the way, I lost sight of this, though, as I got too wrapped up learning how to actually do anything in a game. Not to turn this into a competition, but it turns out that the barrier for entry into making games is way higher than pretty much any other art form. There’s a lot you need to learn if you want to be able to make a project that can get even your close friends to go “Wow, that’s pretty neat”.
Having all these skills, though, and seeing how Kojima blends cinematic storytelling with interactive storytelling, I finally feel equipped again to return to my roots and make movies (games) again.
Next time I’m writing about Metal Gear Solid (series).
My book count hasn’t changed quite as dramatically, but I did spend like three or four months re-reading Pierre and then whittling through Don Quixote, which is the main reason why.
I actually just finished running through BYTE again without reading anything, just checking functionality, and it took about six hours, so BYTE might actually be more gameplay than reading. That doesn't really change my point here, though.
This is a little wordier than I wanted to inject here at the end, but the other day I opened the game and was struck by an intense feeling of looking through a window at Jonathan. The feeling of voyeurism and surveillance comes through in the game so beautifully. I'm so happy with the decision to change the aspect ratio of the game.
While the shaders did not survive, the project at large actually did. What I concepted for the class was a title screen for the game, so when you open the game and see camera sweeping through Dracula's castle, that's all what I did in that 3D studio class. I also chopped up the Clockwork Orange soundtrack and played chunks of it randomly, while blasting moans from Bram Stoker's Dracula at random intervals. The audio experience of that demo was truly beautiful but an absolute copyright nightmare.
I guess Twin Peaks kind of comes out of nowhere here, but that's obviously one of the other core influences for the game. Or maybe it's just a core influence in my life. Either way, that's why it's here.