Stories transport us to strange new worlds, make us care about memorable characters, and more importantly, play with our emotions through their narrative. That’s true of stories written on pages, watched on screens, told by mouth, or played on screens, and especially true when we see a reflection of ourselves within them. For 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Citizen Sleeper developer Gareth Damian Martin, exploring these reflections is where storytelling becomes mos🐭t powerful.
“Sleeper is a questionable person, and he's in this position of being something that we don't know a lot about,” Damian Martin says. “There's a bit of space there for people to project into and to find aspects that relate to themselves. I wrote Sleeper very instinctively in that a lot of what I've written came from very personal things. I was writing a lot of interior dialogue, about sensations, feelings, and thoughts. For me, that was very personal. I was like, ‘Oh, this is very particular’. Then other people came, and they were like, ‘Oh, but that's also particular to me’. That was super interesting, and it's particular in a different way. That was the thing that's been fascinating to watch.
“I totally understand why people with chronic disabilities would relate to that character. What I loved about it is that it's not about ‘this is a representation of this specific identity’. Sleeper has become this malleable thing that can represent lots of experiences of struggle, difficulty, and energy. I don't know if I saw that coming and I've been really humbled by that because it feels like it's not about me, it's about the fact I put something particular down, and then other people came and gave that meaning. It’s a big part of how RPGs generally work, right? You have to rely on the person playing it to give meaning as well.”
When I played Citizen Sleeper, as a parent, it was all too easy to sympathse with single father Lem and his daughter Mina. Having Sleeper help with babysitting so Lem could go to work to secure a better future for them was a no-brainer as, like mos🐼t parents, I’ve experienced the struggle of earning a wage while caring for children all too well.
Damian Martin confesses that they didn’t foresee Lem and Mina being as popular as they are. As a parent, Damian Martin could draw on many things from their own personal experiences f𝓰or these characters, and this helped shape their stories.
“I feel in many games, children are not characters, and I wanted to have a parent character and a child character and have those accurately represented,” they explain. “I wanted to have you babysit a child as a robot because I felt like that represented wh🍒at I wanted to do with the game, which is that you use the same dice system for everything. Do I spend my time babysitting, or do I spend my time salvaging a spaceship? And for me, that kind of choice is like the heart of Citizen Sleeper.”
One character Damian Martin always knew would be a firm fan favourite, Emphis the food vendor, also drew from their own personal experiences. They were one of the first characters written and were inspired by a Vietnamese street food chef tha☂t Damian Marti🌠n used to visit for incredible bánh mì. Damian Martin admired the chef’s meticulousness to his craft, excitedly telling me about the food he made.
The chef would ride in with a grill on the front of his bike, and despite the queue stretching out before him, he’d still take the time to dress each salad individually, rather than just create one large bowl to speed things up. “He worked out exactly his pace𓂃,” the♈y say. “That entire vibe is what I love about the city and about the world. That really inspired me, so when I wrote Emphis, I was imbuing Emphis with all of these values.”
I can only imagine what it’s like to pour your heart and soul into something like this that draws on so many personal experiences and takes so much time and energy to shape. It’s incredible to conside꧙r how Citizen Sleeper has resonated with many players personally in different ways, and even more impressive that Damian Martin accomplished this alone.
“I was with it its entire life,” Damian Martin says. “From the point where it was an idea that didn't make any sense, to all the points where it wasn't working, and the points where it was working. To me, it's this complex intangible object, and especially as a solo developer, there are things that are part of Citizen Sleeper that aren't part of the game. They're just in my mind. When I play the game, I imagine they're there, but that's because the whole world is in my mind.
“When I see other people responding to it, it does make it nice, but it's also watching people respond to something, then you're like, ‘Oh, that's not mine any more’. I made it, put it on the table, and other people came and picked it up off the table and had a relationship with it. I don't think it's healthy for me to try and follow it around. I think it's healthy to try and let go of it. I had my DMs open, and people used to send so many messages to me saying how amazing it was. In the end, I had to close them because I just don't think it's healthy to perceive that because after a while, I was like, ‘This is not about me. This is about those people's experiences with the game’.”
With the s♒uccess of In Other Waters and Citizen Sleeper, Damian Martin feels more pressure to deliver meaningful content because they’ve raised the bar for their work. That brought a new pressure with Purge, Citizen Sleeper’s final expansion. “The more people care about it, the harder it is to end something.” With so many fans invested in the story and excitedly awaiting the ending, Damian Martin wanted to ensure they did right by the players while also balancing what they personally wanted to say.
Citizen Sleeper is approaching its first anniversary on May 5, and Damian Martin promises they have plenty of announcements planned to give fans a sense of where they’re going next. They jokingly give me a glimpse into the future with a reference to the tabletop games that so heavily inspired Citizen Sleeper: “At the moment, like a good GM, I’m laying all of my traps everywhere, and I'm just gonna wait for people to walk into them.”
