Concept Tilium

Core Concept

Tilium is a 2,5d puzzle platform adventure game where you play as Leon who travels back to his hometown, and finds it deserted and decayed. Through the use of mechanics like growing, mirroring and duplicating you need to solve mind boggling puzzles and bosses, and make your hometown the way it used to be.

The game offers the player with numerous challenges on the platform part of the game, by using a sliding puzzle mechanic where the player can move parts of the platform like a sliding puzzle. By combining the puzzles that need to be solved using the mechanics that the player has and the platform challenges, Tilium will bring a new and fresh game to add to it's genre.

Next to the game mechanics, the player will also be offered a beautiful artstyle and progressive storyline that are designed alongside the game to make the world of Tilium alive and coherent with the game itself.
And on top of this all, the game has it's own music composer/sound designer to add that extra layer to the game that will make you remember it long after you've played it.

The Initial idea

The concept of Tilium first started when I played the game continuity. It features a sliding puzzle mechanic which appealed to me from the start. It's really felt fresh and intuitive, yet simple to learn and master. The goal of the game is to use this mechanic in order to move your character through the tile platforms, get the key and then unlock to door to complete the level.

Soon after the game looses it's appeal to me because the simplicity of the mechanic combined with the puzzle aspect of the platforms and tiles itself becomes a mix and match protocol. I found myself repeating the same thing over and over again and that was putting the next tile that fits to this tile, and walk into it. The realization of this was that what actually happened in the tiles itself (jumping and running) was obsolete to the game. The only challenge that opposed to the player was puzzling the tiles, not the platform challenge that was opposed to the character of the game. So this lead to the idea that what happened inside these tiles should be a challenge for the player as well, but it also had to be in combination with the sliding puzzle mechanic so that the platform and puzzle challenge of the game become one.

So in a nutshell, the only thing I used from continuity game is the sliding puzzle mechanic, . The reason for me saying this is because some people asked us this question after we first pitched the game;

"So is Tilium going to be continuity game only with added features?"

No. The game will play completely different because the player will have three core mechanics to his skill-set, other then running, jumping and the sliding puzzle mechanic. They are Grow, Mirror and Duplicating himself. These will be explained later on, but they are used to solve puzzles that are inside the tiles themselves and even puzzles that can only be solved by using different tiles, using the sliding mechanic as well to accomplish this.
At first look the game will look allot like continuity because of the sliding tiles, but other then that there will be no resemblance.

Have I lost you yet? Well if you can't picture the sliding puzzle mechanic, than I would suggest that you play continuity game for just one minute max to get the idea. The other mechanics will be explained in another post so that this thread doesn't become a endless piece of text, plus it will have movies to make them clear.