About Us

We're writers, designers, directors and coders. We love story.

We're based in South Wales, and we work on projects all over the world. What's your story?

Directors

We're Ian and Giles. We run Talespinners. We write, design and produce most of the company's work directly and act as editors and project managers for any subcontractors. Both of us love fable and storytelling, strong world-building, stories which uncover truths and which hit you in the gut. We know about choices, and how to leave gaps to let the player step in.

Ian Thomas

Writer / Coder / Narrative Designer

Ian is a writer, narrative designer, games programmer, and published author and screenwriter. Over the last twenty-five years, he's worked in interactive television, education, film, publishing and the games industry, where he's helped bring to life console & PC games such as SOMA, the LEGO games and the LittleBigPlanet series.

Outside mainstream games, Ian's writing includes the Napoleonic horror movie Fallen Soldiers, the children's Cthulhu book Where's My Shoggoth? and the best-selling interactive story Pendragon Rising. He also writes, designs and directs live-action events such as the acclaimed ghost story God Rest Ye Merry.

Giles Armstrong

Writer / Narrative Designer

Giles is a writer and narrative designer, and has worked in the games industry for ten years, with contributions to more than thirty shipped titles in various roles, including multiple games published by Electronic Arts, Sony Interactive Entertainment and Microsoft Studios.

He has written for the BAFTA award-winning Relentless Software, written on the TIGA award-winning Velocity 2X developed by FuturLab, and was the lead writer on The Descendant, developed by Gaming Corps. Among recent projects, Giles was the lead writer on Bloody Zombies, developed by Paw Print Games, and wrote on RAID: World War II, developed by LionGameLion.

Both Ian and Giles are full members of the Writer's Guild of Great Britain and of BAFTA.

Associates

Chris Tihor

Writer / Game Designer

Chris has been working as a writer and game designer for many moons with folks that include Harebrained Schemes, Tap Tap Tap, Headless Chicken Games and One More Story Games. He's probably best known as the creator of the award-winning game "Mandatory Upgrade: X Marks the Spot". Outside of games he has written comics, short stories, and articles and has even worked extensively as a software developer (Gods help him). He's based in Canada.

Jason Marchant

Writer / Creative

Part writer, part performer, part games journalist and part corporate mouthpiece, Jason has been connecting words into meaningful sequences for the better part of two decades. He’s worked on marketing for games such as Ratchet & Clank and Killzone, scripts and taglines for Nokia and Microsoft, and even finds time to write his own stories and roleplaying adventures. He also likes to act and do the odd voiceover now and again.

He’s a dyed-in-the-wool gamer, and would cite Skyrim, Half-Life and Psychonauts amongst his favourite gaming stories. He loves writing about the fantastic and the funny. He tries to be both.

Michelle Clough

Writer / Editor / Game Designer

Michelle is a part-time/freelance writer and narrative designer based in Vancouver, BC. Co-founder and chair of the IGDA Romance and Sexuality SIG, she has spoken about male sexualization and healthy, diverse fanservice at multiple conferences, including Queerness and Games, PAX Dev, and the GDC Narrative Summit. Her credits include QA for Mass Effect 3, senior writer/editor for the adventure dating sim 1931: Scheherazade at the Library of Pergamum, and current work in sci-fi RPGs, mobile interactive fiction and VR experiences.

Tom Knights

Writer / Game Designer

Tom Knights has worked as a writer and narrative designer for companies in the UK and USA, and has written everything from character dialogue to marketing copy. His recent projects include titles for Pocket Gems and Choice of Games, as well as NaturalMotion's BAFTA-nominated mobile hit, Dawn of Titans.

Matt Gibbs

Writer / Editor / Game Designer

Matt is a freelance writer and editor. He has worked on games such as DICE’s Battlefield 1, Creative Assembly’s Total War: Rome II, Sega’s Binary Domain, and Ubisoft Reflections’ Driver San Francisco. Alongside his games work, he is the Managing Editor of Improper Books, a comic and book publishing studio focused on creator-owned stories that have a touch of the fairy tale or otherworldly about them. Before going freelance, he worked in creative services for Sony Computer Entertainment Europe. Originally a field archaeologist, he has worked on sites covering the Mesolithic to the Medieval throughout the United Kingdom.

Specialists

We work with a wide range of external writers, with specialists in genre, medium, but also in particular topics. Along with games writers, we have award-winning authors, comic book writers, screenwriters, copywriters and editors on our books. Let us know if you're looking for something in particular.