Winner of the 2026 IGF awards for Excellence in Design and the Seumas McNally Grand Prize and nominee for Excellence in Narrative, the enigmatic, nigh-unclassifiable Titanium Court is officially described as "A surreal strategy game for clowns and criminals."
https://youtu.be/1wEQGSvTonM?si=RxBRU7K8jWP91cht
https://youtu.be/1wEQGSvTonM?si=RxBRU7K8jWP91cht
When AP Thomson approached me to apply some "much-needed polish" with a copyedit of the "excessively voluminous script" (his words!) of his unannounced narrative-heavy, match-three strategy opus, I could tell right away that it was something special. The first hint was the trouble I had putting it down long enough to get the edit started!
The game was already superb, with an assured creative voice and a deft, witty, literary style that I knew called for a particularly light touch.
Even so, hardly a line went un-tweaked in our comprehensive edit, which focused on consistency, mechanics (AP credits us with helping him overcome a "natural hatred" of commas), and style considerations like treatment of names and unique terminology, forms of courtly address, formatting of text effects, icons, and variables in an array of custom markdown, and keeping track of characters whose text attributes, speech patterns, and pronouns change depending on the player's knowledge, who's speaking, and whether or not you're currently playing as a sentient building in the future.
Look, one thing everyone agrees on about Titanium Court is that it's tough to describe. And also well worth a visit.
Titanium Court was the winner of the 2026 IGF Seumas McNally Grand Prize and Excellence in Design, and a nominee for Excellence in Narrative.
I was delighted to get to attend the awards ceremony, have my name called out on stage, and help AP wrangle his dual trophies.
Posing with Jenny Jiao Hsia, AP Thomson, and two heavy chunks of glass.
I also got to hang out with fellow IGF-winning editors Matt Carney (*Perfect Tides: Station to Station—*Excellence in Narrative) and Arden Ripley (*Horses—*Nuovo Award). It was really lovely seeing so many editors recognized and celebrated at the ceremony with their teams.