How much have you changed over the past few years? Time is constantly moving. It never stops. We all get older, and the arrow of time is moving forward. It’s inevitable. I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Gareth Damian Martin, lead developer on Citizen Sleeper 2: Interstellar Vectors, after playing some of the upcoming sequel. If you couldn’t tell and thought I was just being introspective, the passage of time is important in Citizen Sleeper 2.
Take Bliss, for example. Bliss is a character you met in the first Citizen Sleeper, and reappears in the sequel. People who met them in the first game might remember that they used “she/her” pronouns back then. But now, after an undetermined amount of time, they recognize themselves as non-binary.
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In Citizen Sleeper 2, when you encounter Bliss, they’ll offer to help you. Fans love their presence, but this reappearance is more than just a keynote for players of the first game. For Martin, Bliss offers “an opportunity for solidarity and an interesting discussion between non-binary people and sleepers about their experiences; that’s something I’ve tried to bring to the forefront.”
When you make any game, especially one where you’re the sole writer, it’s hard to tell how people are going to react. After the success of the first game, Citizen Sleeper 2 was, for Martin, an effort to make narratives about gender identity and other marginalized traits more concrete, rather than just metaphorical.
“With Citizen Sleeper, it was a big part of the game because that’s where I was writing, but putting it out there in the world and having people react to it allowed me to look at everything in a more conscious way and say, ‘Okay, I need to make sure this is still part of the game’.
“One of the ways I didn’t like seeing Citizen Sleeper interpreted was that people acted like it was science fiction; like using a trope to replace a group of minorities. I really didn’t want Citizen Sleeper to be that, so I was like, ‘Well, no, but there are trans and non-binary people in the world of Citizen Sleeper.’”
Along with these explicit changes to worldbuilding come changes to the mechanics within the game world. I wrote about this in my preview of the game, but Starward Vector works very differently from its predecessor. Different classes have different strengths and weaknesses, and some have skills they simply can’t use. The main mechanic of the game is actually dice rolling–you get six dice to use each cycle–but if you try something you’re not good at, you’re likely to get a negative result.
On top of that, you now have to assemble teams for different jobs, with different characters having their own strengths that can complement your shortcomings. But because of this balancing act, various NPCs may end up serving you without having their own autonomy. To address this, Martin tried to give various characters their own sense of autonomy.
“[Citizen Sleeper is] Instead of, ‘Oh, yeah, you’re the captain. Here are your crew. ‘ When you get to a place, they often go off and do their own thing because you can’t control them. It’s especially fun when you get to a place and the Seraphim are like, ‘I have something to do, but the problem is you can’t fly the ship.’ So you have to accept the fact that the Seraphim are going to do something. A big core part of Citizen Sleeper 1 was making the characters feel like they have a lot of autonomy, that they’re not just tools for you to move around.”
This isn’t Dragon’s Dogma, where you get to decide how your pawns look and work, no: in Star Vector, each crew member you take on a job with has their own dice to roll, but you can expect to hear their feedback if you try to ask them to do something they’re not good at (or don’t want to do). Little things like this really help make the characters come to life, as if they actually have their own desires and needs, which is hard to do in a game without motion capture or actors to deliver the lines.
Martin explains that a lot of thought was put into how players would react to certain situations, like Yujin, a character you meet early in the game who might end up giving you some trouble in your first job. “You’ll have some funny moments like, ‘Oh yeah, I gotta pay this back,’ and there’s a progression to things as these people become more involved with you… My writing process is very much like a [TTRPG Dungeon Master]… I wrote a little bit, but left a lot of things unfinished.”
Citizen Sleeper isn’t just about the characters, though. It’s also about the world they live in. The first game was set entirely on a single space station, The Eye, and Martin noted that they liked the “one time, one city” story, but Vector is set very differently. Mainly because it doesn’t just have one space station to visit, but many. One of the most praised aspects of the first game was the way the world was built, and through little snippets of playful text, you can vividly paint a picture of what The Eye is like.
Starward Vector zooms in on the microscopic world and incorporates detail into the game world, making these galaxies a living, breathing place. Martin told me about their experience designing the ecosystem of their first game, In Other Waters, and how they thought about whether there was sunlight in a certain area and what it meant to the biology of certain creatures there. This idea also continued in Starward Vector.
“We’re in the asteroid belt at the edge of the solar system. Where do people get water from? Well, let’s say there’s an icy asteroid that’s being mined… well, they’ve found it. And then you map it and you think ‘ok, these are places you can get water from, but we need to get food from somewhere’, and then you think ‘what other companies might have technology left over’.”
You can feel Martin’s passion for this world as he sits in the same room with them and watches them envision this entire world they’ve created. After all, all of this is important because while all of these systems may be mundane in the world of Citizen Sleeper, they are also necessary and informative. Why That’s just the way life is for these characters. There’s also a war going on in the background of Star Vector–I wasn’t able to feel the full impact of that war during my time with the game, but I’m curious to see it explored further.
This aspect of the game rings true to Martin, too. Their partner is Romanian, from a country that borders Ukraine and is still reeling from the ongoing Russian invasion that began in 2022 (the year the first Citizen Sleeper was released, by the way).
“I spent a lot of time going to Romania and looking at the effects of the war in Ukraine on Romania,” they explain. “Romania is on the Black Sea coast, so mines would wash up on the beaches of the Black Sea, which is interesting in relation to war, because war can be very stressful at times and almost nonexistent at other times. Different people see it differently. I found this very interesting texture very fascinating and very relevant to the theme of crisis, which is very important to the game. This had a big influence on how I saw the belt in CS2 being on the ‘coast of war’.”
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Death, your relationship with your body and the way it exists in physical space – these are themes that were integral to the DNA of the first game. They also reappear in Starward Vector, and they are once again at the forefront of Martin’s mind since they have undergone two surgeries in the past year.
For Martin, putting one’s body in someone else’s care feels like an “unusual thing” that “you do because they’re objective, they look at your body objectively as an object in a way that you never can.” It’s this thought process that has Martin thinking a lot about “health anxiety and how our bodies can be scary and how our bodies can be affected moment by moment and psychologically. I’ve gone through depression, which is a very physical thing, and I have a lot of random aches and pains, but I know they’re not there.”
But it feels like a lot of these ideas could be explored in DLC, expansions, or add-ons. Why go the whole hog and make a full-blown sequel? I asked Maritn.
“In a sense, releasing [Citizen Sleeper] Seeing people reflect on it made me think, “Oh, there are really cool and interesting aspects of Sleeper that I’d love to explore further.” Citizen Sleeper was an experiment, and I [wanted to] Keep it small and tight. ‘Let’s not go crazy.’ I spent two years making it and putting it out into the world to see if it worked, and it did.”
Citizen Sleeper eventually received three pieces of DLC, which allowed Martin to explore specific stories they felt were important, but there’s still a lot more in this tank.
“I still have a lot to do, but I can’t tell these stories anymore because I need more systems. I want to try to push and pull things… [and] To tap into a variety of feelings, to become more aware of what the sleeper represents, and then to try to engage with it more.”
Beyond that, there’s the simple fact that no one has ever made a game of this type – where you assemble a team and go on an adventure – exactly as Martin intended, so for them it’s also about making the game they wish they could play.
“I’m going to take all the ideas that I had for the genre and I’m going to make my vision, and at least I know I’m going to put my stamp on it. Just like when I made In Other Waters; that was me making a Metroid game, even though that game wasn’t really like a Metroid game… So this is my response to Mass Effect 2. It may not be the same as Mass Effect 2, but that’s the point. The point is that it makes up for everything that Mass Effect 2 wasn’t.”
Citizen Sleeper is Martin’s brainchild. Putting out their first game allowed them to think more broadly about the world and the game. “I wanted to write about human beings,” they say. “I built a robot to do that because we’re not usually allowed or permitted to depict bodies in a certain way, because bodies shouldn’t be questioned in fiction. Especially in games.”
Part of what resonated with me when I played the first game were these reflections on how a body exists, how it moves through a given space, how it endures life events, how it ages, how it grows, how it decays. While Star Vector has me playing as a new sleeper who also needs to figure out their own body, based on my conversations with Martin, I’m confident that I’ll take away many new ideas about how I exist in the spaces I’m in.
That’s what art is about, right?
