there's something quietly devastating about sitting with an idea for almost a decade. knowing it's there. knowing you're not ready for it yet.
gareth damian martin has been carrying signet city since 2017. they almost made it their first game. then they almost pitched it instead of citizen sleeper. then citizen sleeper became its own world, its own breathing thing, and signet city waited again. it has always been waiting.
after finishing citizen sleeper 2: starward vector in january 2025, something shifted. "i had to make this game or never make it," they said. and so now, finally, there is a trailer. there is a name spoken out loud into the world.
signet city is a first-person fungalpunk rpg. there is a thing called the canker — a fungal shelf growing in the bay, harvested as fuel for roughly a hundred years. the city itself breathes something of newcastle, glasgow, manchester into it. that particular northern british industrial weight, the kind that settles in your chest like damp air.
but what moves me most about damian martin's work has never really been the settings. it's been the distance they place between you and belonging.
in in other waters, their 2020 debut, you ride along inside a biologist's suit and you can only bleep one sound or bleep another. that's it. that's all you have. "i'd frustrate them and remind them that they're sat behind the computer," they said of that choice. the longing was the point. the longing was the whole game.
then came citizen sleeper, where you are not a hero. you are, as damian martin put it, "a deeply marginalised member of society" navigating a "questionable subjective reality where you don't even know if this is what it feels like to be a human." the dice mechanics borrowed something from blades in the dark, but the emotional architecture was entirely their own.
and now citizen sleeper is, in their words, "a very established form" — they did everything they could do within it. signet city is the door that form couldn't open.
"i hit on a way of taking this setting that i had in my mind and combining it with ideas around where i was taking the rpg with citizen sleeper, but where citizen sleeper wouldn't let me take it," they said.
there's a line they gave that i keep returning to. "if you make a structure where you have to kill goblins, then every quest becomes about killing goblins." it sounds simple. it isn't. it's the whole philosophy. the structure is the story. the structure is the politics of what kinds of lives get to be told.
they want signet city to feel like something you haven't played before. it might remind you of dishonored, they said. it might remind you of disco elysium. but it's trying to be something else, something with a world that is "deep and broad" and genuinely curious about itself.
"it feels like risk-taking's at an all-time low," damian martin said. and then, almost gently: "it would be very hypocritical of me to say that and then not actually do it. if anyone can take a risk, it's me."
there is something tender in that. not arrogance. just someone who has spent nine years earning the right to say: i'm ready now.
"my skills have changed so much over that period," they said of the years since 2017. you can hear it — not as a boast, but as a quiet exhale. like finally setting down something heavy you've been carrying through every room of your life.
i think about what it means to sit with an idea that long. to let it grow in the dark. to trust that when you finally reach for it, your hands will know what to do.
[Original Source](https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/citizen-sleeper-creator-explains-why-theyre-taking-a-swing-with-their-new-rpg)
sophie l.