Citizen Sleeper is a sci-fi, story-based game released in 2022 by developer Jump Over The Age. It manages to be an engaging narrative game with relatively little art or complicated game mechanics. The world building is well done and the mechanics it does have, reinforce the game themes of precariousness and scarcity.
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Gareth Damian Martin, the creative force behind Citizen Sleeper and the Jump Over The Age development company, brings a unique background to game development. British-born and currently based in southern England, Martin grew up in the Orkney Islands north of Scotland. Gareth a video game critic, has a doctorate and a master’s degree in experimental literature, was involved in theatre design and has an undergraduate degree in puppetry. In interviews they’ve also mentioned the experience of working in bad jobs and thinking “ok with the energy I have what can I get done today” which is a theme explored in Citizen Sleeper.
Gareth mentions tabletop role-playing games (TTRPG) such as Blades in the Dark and the experience of being a game master running RPG campaigns as influences on the game. The other big inspiration mentioned is the game Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor that Gareth reviews here.
Citizen Sleeper is interesting to look because while it wasn’t exclusively a one-man project, it is about close as you ever get. Completed in two years, the game has achieved remarkable success, recently surpassing one million copies sold. Gareth handled the design and implementation, while collaborating with Guillaume Singelin for art and Amos Roddy for sound design. It’s a great game to study and try and break down why it works and what similar games it might inspire. Prior to this Gareth developed a game called In Other Waters another a well received, minimalist game.
The game is set on a space station and you play a character that’s a kind of robot with a copy of a human mind running in emulation. If that description intrigues you, you’ll probably enjoy the game.
Citizen Sleeper Development Process
Much like other games we’ve looked at like Guild of Dungeoneering, Citizen Sleeper was paper-prototyped first using index cards and dice.
When it came to implementing the game in code, Gareth chose the Unity game engine. This is a great choice because it’s fast to develop in and has good cross-platform support. Rather than code the game logic directly, a higher level visual scripting system was used called Playmaker. This kind of system is fast for iteration and obviously worked very well for this game. It’s also the kind of interface a curious designer, who doesn’t want to get stuck into text-based code, would be willing to try. A mild word of warning - if you’re making a large, complex game - this kind of plugin scales poorly because there are often speed issues related to serialisation of the visual script graph.
Dice Based Actions
Citizen Sleeper is played a day at a time. On the space station days are called cycles. Each cycle, up to five six-sided dice are rolled and the results are shown at the top of the screen. You use these five numbers to attempt different actions on the space station. One of the early examples is to help a man break down a spaceship. The overall goal is to escape your impoverished situation.
The idea of seeing oneself as a resource, rather than the traditional means of play such as water or electricity, emerged during experimentation with a pen, paper and physical dice.
- Gareth Damian Martin
The above image shows the dice user interface that’s usually in the top center of the screen. The five slots each show the face of a die and you can drag these dice into actions at locations on the map. Once you’ve used a die the space is emptied, that can be seen in the fourth slot here.
Game actions are tied to locations on the station. As you explore these locations, you’ll see a description of the available actions. The dice act as a form of currency for taking actions. Most actions are not guaranteed to succeed. Instead the chance of success depends on your players stats and the value of the die you use to activate the action. Failure to perform an action may have negative consequences like damaging you.
In the screenshot above you can see a “Forage for Fungus” action where you can spend a die to activate it. Spending a die is as easy as dragging one from your set into the slot next to the action description. There’s a note saying it’s repeatable, this means if we wanted to, we could spend all our dice here. There’s also a skill that’s giving us a +1 bonus to any die spent here. This particular action may result in the player finding mushrooms spores that can be used elsewhere.
For most actions in the game, the higher the dice value, the greater the chance that the action is a success. When your dice are used up, you can rest to move to the next cycle which refreshes your dice and that’s the main gameloop.
Citizen Sleeper draws on the feeling of being a member of the precariat, where if you don’t manage your resources well then you won’t survive. The dice system reinforces that. If the dice system was “You get six rolls a day” and you don’t know the value until you decide to attempt a game action, it wouldn’t have been as good. Taking that action might be exciting alone but if every action is essential random at the point of choosing to do it then you strip out any strategy and planning. The game is about managing limited resources and for that to work well you need to know what your resources are.
Inspiration was drawn from the gig economy (uberization), particularly in the UK and beyond, where various services are mediated by decentralized app-based platforms. This move towards freelance roles with a pay-as-you-go structure, seen in services such as Uber, poses significant risks and favors systems over individuals.
- Gareth Damian Martin
When you character wakes-up they start with dice representing the resources they’ll use to try and make it through the next cycle. Given these resources you strategically plan what to do and that’s the mechanic that pulls you through the game. It also adds tension when you want to take multiple actions but can’t afford them, so you’re forced to make a choice.
The other great thing about the dice as currency system is that it’s a core mechanic that’s relatively simple to implement. However it needs to fit the game you’re trying to make. Does it make sense for you story and your game world to put the emphasis on planning out the use of limited resources?
The mechanics are more than assigning dice to actions. The game has some RPG elements and something be akin to stats - your character’s condition and energy which add more depth to main gameloop.
Condition and Energy Stats
The action system ties closely into the player characters stats. The two most important stats are condition and energy. These stats could easily have been called hit points and stamina but those labels wouldn’t reinforce the story or be as accurate as what condition and energy are describing. This reinforcement of the world building through stat names is discussed in the How to Make an RPG: Stats article.
Your player character is a robot with a body that has built-in planned obsolescence. If you do not regularly take a certain drug your body starts to break down and become non-functional. The state of your body is represented by the condition stat. Condition is not recovered by sleeping a cycle instead you need to find vials of special drug (as well as few other methods that can be discovered).
If your condition is poor you receive less dice per cycle. This means the number of actions you can undertake are reduced. Using these dice to perform actions is one of the few things you can do that may restore your condition. Experienced game developers may recognise this is a failure spiral. You start to fail and it becomes easier to fail and harder to succeed. In many games such a spiral is a negative, here it’s a conscious choice. The game, through it’s systems, is trying to promote a sense of precariousness. You need to choose your resources to get the drug or you’ll enter that failure spiral and may not be able to pull yourself out of it.
Skill System
As you progress in the game and perform actions you’ll get rewarded with Upgrade Points. Citizen Sleeper has a simple level system where you can spend these points to buy skills. Skills provide various benefits related to the dice, locations or items you acquire in the game. You can check out the skill screen below.
Clock System
Clocks are circular progress bars that can be filled up a segment at a time. In the table top boardgame, Blades in the Dark, these are often used as alarms for alerting guards, however they can be used for anything. The players may not even understand what actions cause the clock to fill up or if it’s under their control. In Citizen Sleeper the clocks are generally are under your control. They are used represent reputation, some one hunting you, relationships with people, ships being broken down and so on. Each cycle, if you put in effort, you can advance some clocks.
This is a nice way of abstracting a game event over time and can be used to give the players a sense of progress, impending doom and so on.
Gareth makes the note that this is “exposing the variables to the player”, something you generally not done but can really play with the emotions of the player. Quinns, a TTRPG games journalist, in a interview with Gareth mentions setting down a clock labelled “consequences” that he advanced every time one of his players used a powerful skill as a crutch. He said he didn’t know exactly what the clock would do but it had a strong and immediate impact on the players.
Takeaways
One of the takeaways from Citizen Sleeper is it’s novel CRPG system and it would interesting to see that system used in different settings. The game systems pulled me along, it’s very easy to do “just one more cycle”, especially when the save game system is totally passive, it saves now and again and not necessarily after you finish a cycle, so there’s no clean point to stop playing.
1. Prune and Graft Ideas
Blades in the Dark is an apocalyptic fantasy game about taking part in a crime gang. The mechanics of the “clocks” in Citizen Sleeper come from here.
[…] Ideas were inspired by mechanics I had encountered in tabletop games, especially in the game Blades in the Dark.
- Gareth Damian Martin
One takeaway here is to make a note when you encounter an interesting mechanic in some game and then consider how it might work if you pruned and grafted it into an entirely new setting. The second thing to note about the mechanic is that it’s simple to understand and implement, that makes it extremely suited to using in a game when you’re a smaller team or single developer.
2. Table Top Games as a Source of Inspiration
RPGs came from Dungeons and Dragons in the 70s and since then there’s been a lot of cross-pollination between the two mediums. Most successful CRPGs use D&D-inspired, combat focused systems for inspiration but there’s a lot of variety out there and some of those ideas would work well in a video game environment.
The other advantage of table top games is that the mechanical complexity is naturally constrained by the nature of being played by flawed humans. Tabletop players are only willing to take on so much cognitive load before they balk. This makes the table top mechanics unusually well considered and often simple to implement.
3. Thinking About Your Game as a Game Master
Asking “Why does this game have this feeling?” and “How can I build the game to have a feeling similar to a tabletop roleplaying game session?”. Playing a TTRPG has a sense of potential, the games master prepares various threads of what might happen and if the game doesn’t happen to go there, that’s fine but there’s a marker there to revisit. It gives the world more of a real feeling instead of the feeling of a brittle Disney-ride type of game.
4. Small Scope as Strength
Citizen Sleeper was designed from outset to be a small RPG. It uses this smallness to it’s advantage by leaving gaps that can be filled in by the player’s imagination. This isn’t something that just happens; an author needs to be judicious in what’s hinted at, implied but not explicitly spelled out or explored.
The other more prosaic advantage is a smaller RPG is a more achievable project than a larger one. Finally game journalists are, by the nature of their industry, forced to play games in a very compressed timeframe. This tends to give them a bias towards preferring smaller games, so if the game gets a big enough profile for the large sites to look at it, then it has an advantage.
5. Reduce Risks with Paper Prototypes
Paper prototypes allow you to de-risk. You can make all the changes and mistakes you want at the paper stage and the cost is almost zero. You’ve not had music and art commissioned, you’ve not written screenloads of code, you just changed some rules that might exist in your mind or on a notepad. Then when you’ve got the kernel of your game you can evaluate and do some projections to see how much it would cost to make. If you have a good feeling about it, then you can go full steam ahead.
6. Watching a Lot of Let’s Plays
A while after the game came out, Gareth mentioned watching a lot of Let’s Plays to see how people play the game and what they’re thinking when they make the choices. This is too late to help develop the current game but improves intuitions for the next one.
Where to find out more about Citizen Sleeper
There are many interviews out there, I suggest starting out with Sifter’s interview with Gareth here or Eurogamer’s podcast interview over here.