Category: ID@Xbox

GMing for over 100,000 Players in Citizen Sleeper’s First Free Episode

Hi, I’m Gareth Damian Martin, the (mostly) solo developer behind Citizen Sleeper. Today we launch Episode: Flux, the first of three free episodes that are coming to the game in the next eight months, adding new characters and locations to the game as part of an ongoing story that you can follow and affect through how you choose to play.

Citizen Sleeper, if you don’t know already, is a tabletop inspired RPG where you are a sleeper, a digitized human consciousness in an artificial body, owned by a corporation that wants you back. Thrust amongst the unfamiliar and colorful inhabitants of the Eye, you need to build friendships, earn your keep, and navigate the factions of this strange metropolis, if you hope to survive to see the next cycle.

In making Citizen Sleeper I wanted to make a world that felt as open and flexible as a tabletop RPG, which is a challenge when you can’t be a GM (GM stands for Game Master, the person running the game) in the same room as players and react to their choices. Instead I had to “pre-GM” by accounting for different player choices, providing a story with no “main campaign” only different characters to meet and work with, and use time-specific events to make the world feel alive and reactive.

In Episode: Flux I am taking this one step further by running a three episode “campaign” that will tell the longest and most complex story to be featured in the game to date. It follows a refugee flotilla that arrives at the station, and the player will play a key role in the events that follow its arrival.

Making each episode successively will allow me to react to player’s feedback and opinions, just like a GM would, and tell a story with a variety of complications and wrinkles that will allow players to feel that their journey is distinct.

If that sounds like a journey you’d like to be on, the first update Episode: Flux launches today, so give it a play and then head to twitter and let me know @CitizenSleeper what you think.

I’m really excited to be undertaking this unique experiment with the game, and seeing how players react now, and when they reach the finale in 2023. Good luck on the Eye, and enjoy Episode: Flux on Xbox!

Citizen Sleeper

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ROLEPLAYING IN THE RUINS OF INTERPLANETARY CAPITALISM One of 2022’s most acclaimed indies, the Game Awards-nominated Citizen Sleeper is a Tabletop-inspired narrative RPG set on Erlin’s Eye, a ruined space station that is home to thousands of people trying to survive on the edges of an interstellar capitalist society. You are a sleeper, a digitised human consciousness in an artificial body, owned by a corporation that wants you back. Thrust amongst the unfamiliar and colourful inhabitants of the Eye, you need to build friendships, earn your keep, and navigate the factions of this strange metropolis, if you hope to survive to see the next cycle. ROLL THE DICE. DO THE WORK. GET PAID. SURVIVE. Inspired by Tabletop Roleplaying games, Citizen Sleeper uses Dice, Clocks and Drives to create a player-led experience, where you choose your path in a rich and responsive world. Each cycle you use the dice you are dealt to choose what to do with your time. Make or break alliances, uncover truths and escape your hunters. Survive and ultimately thrive, one cycle at a time, and sometimes against the clock! TURN UP FOR YOUR FRIENDS The station plays host to characters from all walks of life, trying to eke out an existence among the stars. Salvagers, engineers, hackers, bartenders, street-food vendors, each has a history which brought them here. You choose which of them you wish to help, and together you will shape your future. ACCESS THEIR SECRETS Eventually, you will learn to use your dice to hack into the station’s cloud to access decades of digital data, uncover new areas and unlock secrets. This is your unique power, and with it you can change your future. Corporate secrets, rogue AIs and troves of lost data await those willing to dive into the depths of the station’s networks. YOU WERE MADE TO DIE Essen-Arp: to them you are just property, one more asset in a portfolio that stretches across the stars. You are the product of an abusive system, in a universe where humanity’s expansion is marked by exploitation and extraction. Escape the makers of your decaying body, and chart your own path in a richly imagined, deeply relevant sci-fi world which explores ideas of precarity, personhood and freedom.