Jump Over the Age founder and solo dev Gareth Damian Martin on Citizen Sleeper 1 & 2, lessons learned, and what the future holds for them.
It’s impossible to talk about indie game development in recent years without stopping to discuss the tremendous achievements which Jump Over the Age’s two Citizen Sleeper games have been. Gareth Damian Martin not only reacted well to the first installment’s massive success; they knocked out an equally engrossing sequel in less than three years. At Guadalindie 2025, I had the opportunity to ask them about their feelings about those two projects and what they’re interested in exploring next.
With over 2 million players across both games, we could safely say we’re talking about a valuable property that’s likely to expand in a variety of ways. For starters, Spindlejack has recently come into existence after Cycles of the Eye; Martin shadow-dropped and described this second tabletop expansion of the world of Citizen Sleeper as a “print & play solo TTRPG about zero-G bike couriers” that’s available for free on itch.io. Where does the IP go from there? How did they deal with some of the divisiveness around the second entry? Martin had a lot to say, and to me, the important thing is that everything came off as humble and sincere. They’re just trying to figure this all out as they go.
“I really wanted to build a foundation for my future work. That’s why I wanted to do the sequel. I wanted to develop my audience and to take advantage of the interest in Citizen Sleeper in order to allow myself in the future to do even more experimental work,” they admitted right at the beginning. While they’ve had a project they’ve been “thinking about since 2018,” Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector solidified the success of and noise around the original into something larger and a ‘safety net’ of sorts for the developer.
They went on to explain what’s different about the next creative process as a result of two consecutive major hits: “The process of making a game at the same time as talking about it is very tiring… I’m gonna take advantage of being able to be quiet for a while and work on something… When I bring it out and reveal it, I want it to be something where I’m really confident about every part of it.” What about the comments on the extra complexity of Citizen Sleeper 2 versus the first one’s ‘lean and mean’ style?
“I wanted it to almost feel like a second season of a TV show. That was a big part of the project. I love Citizen Sleeper and I was so happy with it and know many people really loved it, so I didn’t want to make something that replaced it or somehow undercut it or changed the mechanics in a way that made people say ‘you should not bother playing the first one’ and go straight into the second one. I tried to design a game that I thought of as having different objectives and a different style and a different approach. I think I’m very happy with this kind of split… For me, seeing that shows that I was successful in what I was trying to do, which was to create a companion game.” Martin admits that it was “hard to hear” at first after putting so much effort into it, but now says it’s just part of feeling “very emotional about everything” around launch.
While Citizen Sleeper 2 is generally longer than its predecessor – it “almost doubled the amount of words that 1 had at launch,” Martin says – most players would argue it still feels breezy by today’s standards. They agree that around two years of development is “about what I’m willing to do” in order to tell stories like Cowboy Bebop or Farscape. “I really like those stories and I wanted to make my own one of those… It’s helpful to focus on what it is that you at the beginning of the project wanted to achieve.”
The titular sleepers, digitized humans stuck in artificial bodies owned by corporations, are at the center of both video games, but not the Spindlejack TTRPG, which could be read as the setting coming before the concept of sleepers originally, but Martin shoots that theory down: “The sleepers definitely were the very beginning of the project for me because I was looking at a way to, within science fiction, represent my experiences and other people’s experiences in various different things. I was especially interested in the gig economy… Uber drivers who buy cars from Uber and then they end up in debt to Uber, or company towns in the Wild West where people would go to work in a mine and they’d get paid in company money that could only be spent in company stores… What you might call the anti-human, psychopathic side of capitalism where it’s all about systems and not about people.
And then I was also thinking about my own experiences in gig economy and bodily autonomy and identity… to explore the feeling of being out of sync with your body, whether that’s to do with your identity or your health. In my own life, I don’t really draw divisions, I guess, so I wanted to explore all of those things… You can’t just say ‘What if Commander Shepard was disabled?’ I think that’s why games often fail when they try to focus on trying to bring in some identity or experience, they just stick it on top… You have to begin with the center of the character being this struggle.”
Have all of those ideas landed though? What does Martin think about the player reaction and the conversation surrounding these two stories? “Actually, I think it’s been different between the two games. When I made the first game, it was very instinctive for me, and there were a lot of ideas I wanted to bring in, but there were also lots of ideas that were brought in without doing it intentionally… It had a really strong reception, so I started to see all of these things people were drawing out of the game. I think that really deepened my relationship with the story and the sleepers and the world. With the sequel, I wanted to reflect on those being more conscious of what I’d seen in Citizen Sleeper 1.”
The first installment becoming a sort of niche phenomenon would have pushed things in a different direction, it seems, but Martin leaned on their renewed understanding of their own universe and story to shape a continuation: “I’m always curious to see what people are going to draw out because it really fuels me and creates a kind of feedback for me.” They also teased the conversation around Starward Vector will help shape what’s next.
Moving the conversation in the direction of tabletop games and their clear fascination with them, they revealed Spindlejack’s birth was “a real snap decision” after making Cycles of the Eye and working on a module for Mothership based on In Other Waters, Jump Over the Age’s debut video game. Martin made it very clear they’re not moving away from that space anytime soon: “I love tabletop games and solo tabletop games and how they’re so small and contained… I want to try to develop Spindlejack a little more over time, maybe add other things that can be narrative modules… But yeah, it opened up a new kind of design for me because making something for free actually changes the pressures and feelings around it. It’s so liberating. I’d really like to think about finding ways to do it again in the future.”
As stated before, Citizen Sleeper has gone mainstream, which raises questions like ‘Is this being translated into other types of media?’ and puts extra pressure on Martin as they try to “keep Citizen Sleeper going” while working on something completely new. Lips are sealed for now if you want to ask them about specifics, but they’re not denying that there’s been some interest “out there” as they look for the right partners: “I can’t do the project unless I find somebody who I can work with. Right now I’m working on a full tabletop version of Citizen Sleeper, that’s a side project with a partner… I want to find ways to make it continue, even if I’m not making games.”
I floated the idea of taking the animated show route with the property. Martin liked the suggestion, but pointed out “these things are so hard to make and TV is so messy right now” while also acknowledging there’s an opening for good TV adaptations: “I’m not gonna sign over the rights. I’m only gonna give them permission. For me, it has to be a partnership… Every time there’s a Last of Us or a Fallout, people are like ‘that really worked’ and that helps… For me, it’s natural for because Citizen Sleeper is inspired by TV and episodic narrative, but the exciting thing would be to work on it myself as well.”
So, after all this tabletop talk and confirmation that Citizen Sleeper is here to stay one way or another, is Jump Over the Age looking to step away from such elements as it walks into the next mystery project? Martin doesn’t think so: “I can’t really escape it. I’m so interested in tabletop games and what they can bring to video games. Especially with stuff like Baldur’s Gate 3 coming after Citizen Sleeper 1, I wanted to continue down this path. Tabletop games have lots of really interesting ways of representing information and stylistically, there’s CBR+PNK, which is like a cyberpunk role-playing game that’s on small pamphlets, and it’s really beautifully designed and super-efficient with how it displays information. Those are really important things for games as well… It doesn’t mean that’s what I’ll do forever, but for the moment, I still feel there’s things to be learned and gained from this process.”
