Citizen Sleeper creator Damian Martin has said their warm-hearted series of sci-fi video games will end with Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector, which releases 31st January. However, Citizen Sleeper as a series of games won’t necessarily end there.
The intention, as Martin laid it out to me in a recent interview, is to create a full tabletop role-playing version of the game, and thereby handover future adventures in the series to the TTRPG space that has so inspired it.
Responding to whether that would be it for Citizen Sleeper games after the sequel, Martin replied: “I think it is for video games. I’ll leave myself a backdoor somewhere that I can climb through and dig it out the grave again… But no. I think especially the ending – and I hope people feel this when they reach the ending – I really felt like, okay, this is me saying the final word on it. I really like where I’m leaving it. I’m really happy with that.
“But Citizen Sleeper has meant a lot to a lot of people and so I’m not about to leave that behind,” they added. “The next big project for me will be to work on a Citizen Sleeper tabletop game in full, but I need to find the right collaborator and I need to work that out, and I need to do that alongside other stuff. So that’s something that will be a more long-term project.”
Martin has collaborated on tabletop projects before. Their game In Other Waters was adapted for tabletop via a collaboration by Lone Archivist, and Citizen Sleeper was adapted into a solo, tarot-based tabletop game with Alfred Valley’s help, so there’s a strong precedent there.
The video game Martin will make next is actually the game they were pitching to their publisher Fellow Traveller before development on Citizen Sleeper 2 began. It was only the runaway success of Citizen Sleeper 1 – now at one million players and counting – that derailed those plans, turning Martin’s head towards add-on content and, eventually, a sequel.
“I was actually already pitching my next game, which was not Citizen Sleeper 2, to my publisher,” they said. “That’s actually going to be the next game.”
Citizen Sleeper 2 arrives to much anticipation on 31st January. Demos have already given us a glimpse of a game that’s quite different from Citizen Sleeper 1, with a much stronger sense of tension in it and more developed, and distinct, role-playing systems. The changes work brilliantly; this could be special.
The development cycle, however, hasn’t been easy. Personal challenges, as well as the pressure of living up to expectations, have made life difficult, I discovered speaking with Martin. Success, as much as we court it, can be hard to deal with.
Look out for my full Citizen Sleeper interview soon.
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