Have you heard the news? A Death in Hyperspace won the 2024 Nebula Award for Game Writing!
A group of ten awesome writers and game writers worked together to create this project last summer (myself among them!), and we’re all really excited to be representing non-commercial, independently created games on such a stage.
Today I’d like to talk a little bit about the award, game writing and interactive fiction in general, and what makes A Death in Hyperspace so special.
(And if you haven’t already, you can play A Death in Hyperspace for free right here!)
What is the 2024 Nebula Award for Game Writing?
The Nebula Awards are an annual award for creative work in the genres of science fiction, fantasy, and other related genres. Unlike the Hugo Awards, which are a fan award, the Nebulas are run by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA), and voted on by SFWA’s roughly 2400 members. In other words, the Nebulas are a peer award decided by writers who are members of one of the largest SFF writing organizations out there.
According to the Nebula website, the first Nebula awards were handed out in 1965, and they’ve been awarded every year since to writing in a number of categories—primarily those recognizing excellence in prose fiction. Game writing was added as a category in 2019, and the 2024 Nebula Award for Game Writing was handed out in June of 2025 for games published in 2024.
UNIVERSFIELD: The Ambient Artists of the Death in Hyperspace Soundtrack
Before I talk more about the Nebulas and game writing, I want to give a hearty “Thank you!” to UNIVERSFIELD, a Ukrainian project working to create high-quality royalty-free music for games, films, and videos.
The tracks we used in the game were “Futuristic Sci-fi Arpeggio,” “Intergalactic Ambiance,” “Nebula Soundscape,” “Orion Nebula 2,” “Serene Dreamscape,” and “Starlight Harmonies” all sourced from the Free Music Archive, where they’re available under a CC-BY-SA license. UNIVERSFIELD was kind enough to give us permission to use the songs without the “Share alike” (although we did actually release the game under a Creative Commons license!), and their sound absolutely elevated the game to a whole new level.
Here, for your listening pleasure, is a track called “Infinity.” (This one isn’t in the game, but is conveniently embeddable!)
Please consider backing UNIVERSFIELD on Patreon and supporting their work! And of course, they’re definitely worth checking out if you’re looking for assets for your own game or film project.
Finalists for The 2024 Nebula Award for Game Writing
Each year, the Nebula for game writing presents voters with a fascinating mix of games in every genre and type. Because there’s only a single category for game writing, the award serves as a neat snapshot of what you can accomplish with games of all kinds.
The 2024 Nebula award for game writing is no exception. From multi-million dollar console games with truly massive teams (Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree) to small-team TTRPGs (Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast), and from indie video games (1000xRESIST, Pacific Drive, Slay the Princess) to text games (Restore, Reflect, Retry and The Ghost and the Golem), there was an amazing array of games on offer.
It was a fantastic honour to be sharing space with these great titles. Although I haven’t played every single one, I thoroughly enjoyed the games I could fit in—and can’t resist giving another special shout-out to my personal favourite 1000xRESIST, which I’ve talked about before.
If you’d like to check out the others, all the finalists for the 2024 nebula award for game writing are linked from the Nebula website.
Interactive Fiction and the Joy of Creative Collaboration
One of the things that made A Death in Hyperspace so fun to work on was that our main goal with it was to, well, have some fun! The whole deal was to get together with our friends and create something interesting and new.
The other writers on the team and I all know one another already, and I reached out to folks in March of 2024 with the idea of putting something together for IFComp. IFComp is a big, annual, community-run competition that celebrates new interactive fiction (IF)—various kinds of text-based video games, more or less.
It might seem weird to think that there even is such a thing as a text-based video game in 2025, but the interactive fiction community is alive and well. And perhaps less surprisingly, it’s a community that doesn’t focus much on making a profit. Instead, what you’ll find when you dive into the IF community forum or one of its many Discords, or when you take part in a game jam or competition, is a bunch of cool folks who are driven by creating neat things and building a community.
And that’s one of the things I love about IFComp and other game jams: “winning” isn’t really the point. It’s to make something and share it, and have fun with other members of the community. That’s the same spirit we had in mind when we made A Death in Hyperspace, and all of us who were involved in the game are excited that the members of SFWA who voted for the 2024 Nebula award for game writing found the end product enjoyable.
As the winner of this year’s Andre Norton award Vanessa Ricci-Thode noted in her acceptance speech, there are many paths to writing. That holds true for game writing just as much as prose fiction!
How We Wrote A Death in Hyperspace
I’ve been involved with writing and playing IF since I volunteered at sub-Q Magazine back in 2016. And although I’ve played some of the games from IFComp I never quite managed to enter. That changed in 2023, when James Beamon and I threw together a goofy, slapstick mashup of The Lord of the Rings and The Great British Bakeoff called One Does Not Simply Fry that tied into our recently-released title The Bread Must Rise.
Working with James on those two games was, frankly, a blast. So what if, I wondered, I get even more people involved?
With that idea in mind, I threw together a basic pitch (“Murder mystery with a grieving, possibly-delusional spaceship detective/narrator”) and started reaching out, and eventually our crew was assembled: me, Phoebe Barton, James Beamon, Kate Heartfield, Isabel J. Kim, Sara S. Messenger, JingJing Xiao, Natalia Theodoridou, M. Darusha Wehm, and Merc Fenn Wolfmoor.
From there, the project went in stages.
First, we collaboratively generated a list of rooms and people wrote descriptions for them. Even at this early stage, it was really interesting to see how the descriptions and ideas everyone shared started to solidify the setting and make it something more than just what I’d half-assedly come up with.
Next, I put together some web-based forms in Google Forms. The first of these guided the other writers through the process of creating a character—giving us a cast that felt relatively cohesive but also distinctly individual. The second asked each writer to pick a certain number of rooms that their character frequented and to describe a few things they did in each.
By this point, the basic framework for the game was in place, and I threw things into Twine. The characters moved around in the ship and you could look around and see what each was up to, but that was all. Still, there was already a kind of atmosphere similar to what’s in the finished game!
With all our actors on the stage, there were two more forms. The first was an interrogation from Pearl (the ship/detective), with each character answering in their own voice. The second was a behind-the-scenes questionnaire that gathered information about the character’s motivation, backstory, and possible endings.
After that, it was just more Twine work to set things up properly, some changes to the stylesheet and backgrounds (courtesy of Darusha!), adding the music, and making a bunch of other small tweaks and changes.
Which brings me to the next point.
The Importance of Beta Testers
After all that work, A Death in Hyperspace was, uh, playable. But it was quite buggy, and definitely wasn’t finished.
Enter the beta testers!
Before IFComp’s release date, we requested feedback from quite a few folks, and ended up with beta testing comments from E.D.E. Bell, Minerva Cerridwen, Karen Chien, Summer Fletcher, Lauren Ring, Xavier Warren, and Aletheia Knights.
I can’t overstate how important beta testing feedback is. There’s a reason, after all, that IFComp recommends it on every entry!
And, indeed, it was our crack team of testers that really took A Death in Hyperspace from “playable” to “fun.” Changes we made at this stage were myriad and I frankly can’t remember most of them. But I know I made some changes to the timer and link settings to make things clearer, and there were a lot of little bugs and typos to iron out as well.
And the update process didn’t stop with our beta testers. IFComp judges also leave feedback! I don’t think I made a lot of changes to the game at that point, but I know I made at least a few more tweaks before posting the game to Itch in December.
I’m embarrassed that I forgot to thank our beta testers in my lackluster Nebula acceptance speech. To be honest, I didn’t think we had the slightest chance of winning, so I didn’t prepare it as thoroughly as I should have!
So, for the record: THANK YOU, BETA TESTERS! This game wouldn’t be what it is without your expert feedback.
Writing Update
A Death in Hyperspace was last summer’s writing. What am I up to now?
- I wrote a novella! It’s roughly 21,000 words long and features the North York Moors national park, hallucinatory figures, severe anxiety, and a whole lot of walking.
- My short story “The Square Root of Forever,” about alien symbiotes and a melancholy sapphic sort-of romance, is in Lesbians in Space, a new anthology from Space Wizard Science Fantasy, which comes out on June 24th.
- A reprint of “The View from Driftwise Spindle,” which first appeared in IGMS back in 2016, will appear in the 22nd issue of Daikaijuzine on June 21st.
- I am finishing up the last round of edits on Spire, Surge, and Sea, my latest ChoiceScript game. The game also now has a release date! Look for it in late July from the Choice of Games webstore, or wishlist Spire, Surge, and Sea on Steam any time you want.
That’s it for me this month. Hope you’re doing okay out there!