TileTale is a serene strategy and puzzle game. Players rebuild lost Huizhou villages by placing tiles on an unfolding scroll, balancing exploration, choice, and restoration in a calm, meditative journey.

Summary:

Team Members & Responsibilities

Dingqian Zhang (me)- Game Designer / Project Manager
Zicheng Zhao - Programmer
Zixuan Han - Artists
Xiaoxuan Li - Artists
Junxiao Wen - Audio Designer

The inspiration for this project originated from a casual board game gathering where I first played Carcassonne. Its modular tile system and dynamic scoring mechanism deeply impressed me, inspiring the grid-based spatial design in my prototype.

Later, Townscaper influenced the construction mechanics — the playful process of stacking and organically merging adjacent buildings became a key idea in shaping the visual and structural logic of my world.

Finally, Dorfromantik offered a narrative and interactive perspective that perfectly matched the emotional tone and camera style I envisioned for this project. These experiences together shaped not only the game’s rules and form, but also its rhythm — blending systematic design with the spontaneous joy of creation.

Core Experience:


· Rich Dynamic and Visual Experiences Inspired by Traditional Architecture
The visual design draws from traditional Huizhou architecture, emphasizing layered composition, reflection, and movement that immerse players in a dynamic world.

Tile System

Building Tile

River Tile

Tile Connection and Completion Rules

If the player wishes to earn points, each tile edge must connect to another tile with the same type of edge
(e.g., river-to-river, building-to-building, or blank-to-blank).
Continuity Check – Connected tiles of the same type form a continuous structure.

How to Play/ How to Win

Players use the tiles in hand to gradually reconstruct the full map of the ancient architectural complex. Completing smaller sections—such as local settlements or road networks — grants points, which allow the player to advance along the scroll and obtain new resources for restoration.

This cycle of reconstruction and progression repeats until the entire village landscape is restored. Logically, the game ends when the player reaches the final layer of the scroll, symbolizing the completion of the restoration journey. Visually, the game concludes when the once-blank map is fully filled, and the ancient Huizhou village is revived in its entirety.

Representative Huizhou Architecture
— Ancient Villages of Southern Anhui

In the Huizhou region, it has long been a tradition for successful merchants to return to their hometowns in glory, rebuilding ancestral residences and constructing clan halls.This practice gave rise to the distinctive Huizhou architectural complex, characterized by features such as horse-head walls, decorative gateways, arches, and memorial archways. Together, these elements form a cohesive architectural style that has become one of the most representative examples of Jiangnan architecture, serving as both a vessel and an essential component of ancient Huizhou culture.

A river is considered complete when all connected river tiles form a continuous flow with no open ends or mismatched edges.

Gain 5 tiles.

This project marked my first experience in crafting a comprehensive numerical system that actively shaped gameplay dynamics.

To achieve fine-grained balance, we divided each square tile into four triangular zones, allowing hybrid compositions of buildings, rivers, and open spaces. This modular structure enabled us to analyze player choices with precision during playtesting.

Through extensive iterations, we studied how different tile distributions impacted player behavior. Some tile types appeared frequently and yielded easy points, while others were rare and challenging. To reinforce design fairness and variety, we rebalanced the scoring model — assigning higher point values to difficult, low-frequency tiles to encourage diverse playstyles. We then established progression thresholds tied to stage advancement.


Given that the game board spans a 9×10 tile grid, we calculated the theoretical maximum score to ensure each stage remained achievable under optimal play. After further testing, we identified three major scoring drivers: tile combinations, event bonuses, and item-based rewards.


From these findings, we designed a dynamic progression formula:
1.each stage increases the threshold by 15 points by default,
2.plus an additional 10 points once the player obtains their first item, and another 5 points after acquiring the second.This adaptive scaling creates a smooth yet responsive difficulty curve, allowing the gameplay rhythm to evolve naturally alongside player growth.

Game Obstacles

Players earn points by connecting architectural and river fragments in their hands. Once a certain score threshold is reached, the player advances one layer forward on the scroll,with each new layer offering a chance to obtain additional fragments or special resources.

Throughout the process, players must carefully plan the placement of each fragment,balancing local completion with long-term progression under limited resources. The goal is to accumulate enough points to sustain advancement — running out of resources before completing the restoration will result in game failure.

VIDEO

We developed two distinct visual models to emphasize the contrast between pre- and post-restoration states.
Before completion, the world appears in ruins — dry riverbeds, fractured walls, and faded textures, symbolizing decay and incompleteness. Once a section is fully restored, it transforms into vibrant architecture and flowing rivers, accompanied by ambient sounds of water and wind. This dynamic shift from ruin to renewal provides strong visual and auditory feedback, offering players a profound sense of accomplishment and motivation to fully restore the map.

Environment Reference

Algorithm Design for Gameplay

Production Schedule

For environmental design, we distilled the architectural essence of Huizhou’s ancient villages, capturing their distinctive spatial character and cultural warmth. Through abstracting and reassembling key features — whitewashed walls, horse-head gables, layered rooftops, and irregular windows — we transformed traditional forms into digital, interactive architecture that retains their regional identity.

To evoke a lived-in atmosphere, we incorporated authentic everyday objects such as stone stools, wooden benches, clay jars, and water tanks.These small details infuse the environment with a tangible sense of life and humanity, allowing players to feel as though they are walking through a revived Huizhou village rich with memory and warmth.

During early gameplay validation, we encountered a core challenge: in a physical board game, identifying a closed shape relies on human visual intuition — but in a digital environment, we needed an algorithmic way for the computer to recognize closure. After several days of discussion and testing, we developed an edge-pair matching algorithm to determine whether a shape is closed. Each tile’s four edges are analyzed for adjacency and type compatibility.

When all neighboring edges are properly paired and no open boundaries remain, the system confirms a closed structure, triggering the corresponding score and visual feedback. This approach not only solved the closure detection problem but also enhanced player satisfaction by providing a logical and rewarding sense of completion within the digital tile system.

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