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So I spent a lot of my time trying to think about what’s an interesting story.
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…Because I know that my dice system will make that mechanically interesting, especially in Citizen Sleeper 2.
Am I the kind of person who’s saying, ‘Chop down this door?'"
That’s what I think about when I’m thinking about dice decisions.
Why a six-sided die system?
Is that just your favorite?
Did testing reveal unfavorable results with a four-sided or eight-sided die?
They know that there’s a danger of things going bad.
There’s a danger.
It’s just a thing that’s in me.
I sometimes forget that for the grand majority of the world, the six-sided d6 is all there is.
There is no other die.
I’m sure [if] those people [saw] a d4, they’d lose their minds.
“What part of the triangle am I looking at?
There’s so many numbers on this right now, what’s happening?”
And d20s are associated with D&D and they’ve become the brand image of D&D.
That’s now our line for describing the game.
And I wouldn’t have done that if it wasn’t for Baldur’s Gate 3.
When Citizen Sleeper 1 came out, people would not understand what that meant.
There aren’t additional players or a Game Master to lessen the sting of a bad roll.
It’s a genuine massive design factor [to] design around it.
And the only [auto] save I have is at the start of the fight.
If that was my game, that would be a game-breaking bug.
That auto save would be the only thing you had.
So I have to design around every possibility of failure to keep the player playing.
[In Citizen Sleeper 2,] any job can fail and succeed on so many different terms.
For example, you might succeed at a job but you might use five supplies on the job.
Now, supplies cost 15 [each].
That’s a shitload of money that you’ve just thrown away.
Could you have done that contract faster [and saved money]?
But if you do gather more scrap, that derelict also becomes more unstable.
So you cannot [gather in] that bit [anymore].
And you might end up better off than if you did the job [safely or more slowly].
But that push starts them on a spiral.
The moment you get one stress, then you get more stress.
I’m going to risk it anyway."
And so you set your own difficulty level as you go as well.
I always like offering opportunities for the player to get themselves in trouble.
And I think that’s a big part of the design of Citizen Sleeper.
And for the game to keep playing, how can the game keep playing in almost every circumstance?
Now, this time we do have the dangerous difficulty where there is a permadeath.
So that’s the only version of the game where the player can’t keep playing.
And that is an honor mode-style game.
And I would never recommend that for first-time players unless they really love that stuff.
I don’t think Citizen Sleeper 1 would’ve benefited from a permadeath mode.
No, I’ve looked.
But there are shitloads of Dungeons & Dragons-inspired video games.
We drown in them.
How does Citizen Sleeper 2 react to the player’s luck or decision-making, if at all?
like when you’re running a tabletop game.
It’s going to lead to interesting things in the story.
And that’s something I tried to do early on in the game and communicate really clearly.
And that choice can lead you to then choose to fail the contract on purpose.
And if you fail the contract, the contract can go another way.
If it’s all successes, it gets boring.
And if you stack it all in your favor, it loses life.
It doesn’t feel weighty or meaningful.
So for me, I’m always playing that game.
I want that to happen at least once for every player.
So that’s what I’m focused on.
I want that to come through.
This interview was edited for both brevity and readability.
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