Nintendo Life: Citizen Sleeper was a huge success back in 2022, but you’ve said in the past that a sequel wasn’t the natural next project for you. What was it that made you want to come back to this universe for Citizen Sleeper 2?
Gareth Damian Martin, Jump Over The Age: I’m a big fan of making experimental projects, and inventing new designs within games, which means a sequel isn’t always my first instinct. But with Citizen Sleeper, I felt there was still so much more of the experiment to do! The first game was fairly modest in terms of system and scale, so it left plenty of space for new systems and ideas. In particular, I’m a big fan of “ship and crew” sci-fi series like Cowboy Bebop and Farscape, but I have always felt games never quite got the genre right. So it was exciting to try to make one of these stories within the Citizen Sleeper universe, which I felt was ideally suited to this kind of storytelling.
In the end, I felt like there was an opportunity to build on the first game while also offering something equally fresh and different so that the two games could sit alongside each other as a pair.
Citizen Sleeper 2, like its predecessor, is about a lot of different things: capitalism, humanity, survival, loneliness, etc. What are the biggest challenges of balancing so many themes when it comes to writing a story like this?
I have to be honest, I don’t really write “thematically” when I’m telling a story. I’m not really focused on making statements. Instead, I am very interested in my characters and the different paths they can take through the game.
I really hope players enjoy connecting the dots between the two games
When I start writing, I often have a lot of situations in my mind that feel interesting or exciting. I might have an idea for a contract where you instigate a mutiny on a ship in the middle of a general strike or an idea for a group of characters who are all pursuing the same long-lost interstellar drive. I select and invent these based on my own interests, so the reason Citizen Sleeper has these themes is because that’s what interests me in the world! That’s when I really set up the subjects of the story, and from that point on, my mind is focused on who the characters are, how they speak, how the world works, and what might make for a compelling plot.
Some stories are compelling because they are tense and pacy, others because they are introspective and heartfelt. For me, the beauty of Citizen Sleeper is that the game can contain all these atmospheres and stories at once, so I don’t worry too much about balancing. If it interests me and seems like a strong story, I try to get it in!
Despite sharing some narrative DNA, this sequel feels like it can be played by those unfamiliar with the first entry. How important was it for you to create something that continues the Citizen Sleeper universe, but also works as a standalone?
I think this is always an important part of making a sequel, you have to assume that this is the first game for players. But rather than see this as a limit, I saw it as an opportunity. I have always been a big fan of time skips in stories. When done well, they mix all the existing ingredients of the story, and then the reader or player gets to feel smart and curious as they piece it all back together and tell their own story of what happened in the missing time between.
What is especially fun with a time skip is they often allow for the prequel/sequel order to be read in either way, as discovering where a character came from is as compelling as discovering where they end up. So this was a big focus when making the game, and I really hope players enjoy connecting the dots between the two games and being surprised by the often unusual journeys characters may take.
The sequel appears to be much more rooted in the RPG genre, with clearly defined class skills, missions and expanded dice mechanics as just a few additions. Were there any other games (video or tabletop) that inspired these mechanics during development?
As with the first game, Citizen Sleeper 2 was massively inspired by designs and concepts from pen-and-paper TTRPGs. Blades in the Dark was the first tabletop game I ever ran, and it remains my favourite. It inspired the first game, and with the sequel, I saw the opportunity to adapt more of its systems into a video game. Citizen Sleeper 2’s “push” mechanic, where you accrue stress to gain a bonus to or reroll your dice, is a direct inspiration from that game, and its systems are designed around asking the player to “push their luck”.
stress quickly became a very useful tool to represent all kinds of systems in the game
In the stress systems I added to Citizen Sleeper 2, I took inspiration from the myriad of stress systems appearing in tabletop games over the past five years, but especially Mothership and Heart: The City Beneath. There’s so much good and exciting game design happening in the tabletop scene, and I find it a constant inspiration for my own work.
On the video game side, my main touchstone was Mass Effect 2. I wouldn’t say I was attempting to replicate anything from Mass Effect 2, however, more that I wanted to make a game that approached similar ideas in a different way. I often find this is a way I like to work in games. In Other Waters was my own take on Metroid Prime, refocusing it on scanning and xenobiology. In the same way, Citizen Sleeper is my own take on the Mass Effect series, shifting the focus from saving the galaxy as a supercop to learning to live and survive in the margins of an interstellar society.
With community and home being such an important part of the first game, how does this theme play into the larger setting of the Starward Belt in the sequel, and what challenges do the new hubs pose for the Sleeper?
Ideas of home play out a little differently in Citizen Sleeper 2: rather than having a massive urban megastructure as the location, the game plays out over a series of scattered habitats of varying size and style. Because of this, your home really becomes the Rig, a ship you have stolen and that expands and changes over the course of the game. I really want to capture that slow and subtle process of transformation as the ship gains crew and becomes more familiar, and often in writing the game, I found that to be in contrast with the Hubs, which ultimately, you always have to leave.
So I think at the heart of the game is a tension between moving on and settling down, which feels very important to the Citizen Sleeper series in general.
There were many stressful moments in Citizen Sleeper, and now Stress is a mechanic in the sequel. Why did you decide to implement this, and what effect will it have on your relationships in-game?
Citizen Sleeper 2 ties up some of the ideas nicely, while also opening up the possibility of more stories
Stress systems are a fairly popular and well-battle-tested element in many contemporary TTRPGs, and I think that’s because they offer an abstract form of harm vs Health Points. You might take stress from a heist, a difficult negotiation, or babysitting a child, but you hopefully wouldn’t take HP damage! This allows for a broader range of challenges for players and also consequences. I was really aware of the possibilities this opened up for telling a broader range of stories from running TTRPGs, especially ones that aren’t focused on combat. So this was one of the first things I wanted to add to the sequel.
As I developed these ideas in Citizen Sleeper 2, stress quickly became a very useful tool to represent all kinds of systems in the game. It represents the stress your body is under and the possibility that the pressure might turn into real and permanent harm. It represents your crew’s eagerness to continue working on a contract when things don’t go well. It also represents more abstract ideas, like how quickly a derelict ship is falling apart, or the opinions of a disgruntled crew turning against their captain. So stress bars of various kinds will have a huge effect on your path through Citizen Sleeper 2, and I think managing them is one of the most compelling and tense parts of the game.
This time around, I really wanted the game to be stressful, compelling and filled with emergent stories of success and failure. Stress is the tool that allows me to achieve that.
You recently told Eurogamer that Citizen Sleeper 2 would be the last video game in the Citizen Sleeper universe, but a tabletop adaptation is still on the cards for the future. How does it feel to be thinking about returning the game to its tabletop roots and is there anything you feel will be lost/gained in the process?
I’m very early in the process of making a Citizen Sleeper TTRPG (as you might imagine, I’ve been busy with the sequel!), but I have a very clear objective with it. I’m really happy with the two games and the story they tell in this universe. I think Citizen Sleeper 2 ties up some of the ideas nicely while also opening up the possibility of more stories. My aim with the TTRPG is to hand the tools to tell those stories over to the player and to let them carry whichever threads catch their interest forward with their friends (or start totally new ones).
What gets left behind by doing that is, of course, my own presence as the narrator of those stories, but I think after two games, there are a lot of references for people to go to if that’s what they want. What is gained is the radical openness of a tabletop system, the chance for players to fill in the gaps in a meaningful way and really explore their connections to the universe’s characters and ideas. Which, in a way, is what these games have been about all along.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Thank you to Gareth for taking the time to answer our questions and to Jasmine at DoubleJump Communications for setting it up. Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector launches on the Switch eShop on 31st January for £20.99 / $24.99.
