Pirate brings a story-driven puzzle experience to the table

NineZyme OÜ has launched Tile Tales: Pirate on both Android and iOS, offering an exciting sliding-tile puzzle gameplay filled with treasures and enjoyment. This beautifully designed game, created by a talented team, features nine stunning biomes with 90 levels, taking you on a journey from sunny beaches to dark and moody graveyards. You will have to navigate through numerous trials and tribulations in search of the ultimate lost treasure.

The story of puzzle and adventure

Tile Tales: Pirate is a puzzle game blending story-driven and adventure gameplay elements, inviting you to explore a mysterious island and overcome numerous challenges in their search for the ultimate lost treasure. With its beautiful visuals and lush environment designs, this game is perfect for players who love puzzle titles but also want to experience funny animations and character interactions as the game offers entertaining cutscenes.

Tile Tales: Pirate boasts 90 uniquely handcrafted puzzles that challenge you to solve with fun tile-sliding mechanics, allowing to slide tiles to create paths and anything shiny along the way. With great replayability and stunning cartoony visuals, this beautifully designed game combines everything perfectly together to deliver a great gameplay experience for modern gamers.

Why you should play Tile Tales: Pirate

• This story-driven puzzle incorporates adventure gameplay elements.
• Features 90 uniquely handcrafted puzzles spread across 9 chapters.
• Captivating graphics and lush environments to explore.
• An immersive gameplay experience with high replayability.

From concept to creation: Developer Insights

In a conversation with GamingonPhone, Andrew Mattingly, the founder of NineZyme, an Estonian-registered company, shared important details about Tile Tales: Pirate during our discussion. He also provided insights behind the game’s inspiration, its sliding-tile puzzle mechanic gameplay, the balance between engaging puzzles and light-hearted storytelling, and more.

NineZyme was founded in early 2019 by Andrew Mattingly, who initially operated the company alone, funding it by himself by cashing out 100% of his life savings before expanding the team. With over 20 plus years in the gaming industry, he wanted to try something new. He explains, “I had seen a lot (too much, some might say)… and I wanted to build something new – with less politics, less barriers, more equity, more balance, and more opportunity.” His idea and main goal was to craft games that he enjoyed, and invested everything in this idea.

“By mid-February 2019, I had hired my first teammate, Yulia Sokolova – an amazing character artist,” he recalls, adding that she was “the very first person who I had ever reached out to regarding job opportunities.“ He shared how the team grew to 10 members at one point, eventually adding Mauricio Flores, a very talented environment artist. Mr. Mattingly praised Mr. Flores’ “great hand-painted style which meshed extremely well with Yulia’s character designs.”

He also reflected on their challenges, stating, “the three worked part-time, on the side of our other jobs, with a very ambitious project – entirely unrelated to Tile Tales: Pirate.” The team expanded with the addition of Sofía Vignau, a character animator with years of experience and the partner of Mr. Flores. “Without even the blink of an eye, we immediately recruited her to the team!” he remarked.

Discussing the roles of the team members, he explained, “I handled the code, game design, and a little bit of everything else.”He also shared that the development of Tile Tales: Pirate began in December 2023.

The inspiration behind Tile Tales: Pirate

To feed my curiousity on how the team was inspired to create a pirate theme game with a mixture of puzzles, I asked Mr. Mattingly about it. He explained that he was the one who suggested the pirate-themed game with a cartoon-like style, “This was really just a combination of market research and budget/time considerations. Not the most exciting way to think about it, I know.“

He went on to explain how their initial big project was too ambitious for their small-sized team, requiring more budget and time. “We decided to take yet another big gamble and temporarily pivot to a much smaller game that we could accomplish significantly faster,” he recalled, adding that’s how this game came into existence.

When discussing the inspiration behind the storyline, he shared that it came naturally during the development phase. Although the team didn’t plan the story, he mentioned, “We did decide on the different environments/biomes fairly early on,” and explained that the dialogue and narrative mostly evolved based on “the pieces that we had to work with at any given moment.”

Team collaboration and challenges based on time-zone differences

When I asked about how the team communicates and collaborates, Mr. Mattingly explained that it is one of the easier aspects of the whole development process, primarily because they are a small team. He shared, “We use Slack for nearly 100% of communication and just stay on voice chat all day, to quickly and easily bounce ideas off of each other.”

Although their time zones are now somewhat aligned, it wasn’t always that way. Reflecting on their current situation, he remarked, “We do find that having common working hours makes a big difference to the cohesive feeling of a team.“

He also spoke about the challenges he and the team had to face during the early days, describing, “It was much more difficult when you had to wait 5 or 6 hours for someone to start their day and answer a question, or provide feedback on something.” He shared how it was unpleasant to ask others to start work at 4 am, adding, “just so that we could all have a similar work schedule.”

While at it, he shared the studio’s plans with future hires, saying “One of our primary goals with any future hires will be that they are in a similar time zone to us (Europe).” However, he also said that the team is open to hiring people who are willing to adjust their work hours with the team. He concluded by saying, “If we ever do branch into multiple teams in the future, we would of course leave it to each team to decide what works best for them.“

The decision to add the sliding-tile puzzle mechanic and make it the core gameplay feature

Speaking about the sliding-tile puzzle mechanics, Mr. Mattingly revealed that Ms. Sophie originally inspired the idea. While brainstorming game ideas as a team, “she mentioned those old physical puzzles where you’d slide tiles around to make a picture or create a grid of numbers, etc.” he shared. Sticking to that idea, she suggested to the team how it could be adapted to construct a path for a character to move along, as per Mr. Mattingly.

He got quite excited while recalling the moment and expressed his excitement, saying how that brief idea sparked his mind with imagination about how the game could be. He further added, “and how we might be able to extrapolate that idea into something more narrative based and entertaining… with lots of fun animation, special effects, and audio.“

Reflecting on the overall progress, he admitted that they went way overboard with the idea for this simple project, saying, “Our team always strives to do a little bit more – and it ended up taking on a life of its own, and becoming something better than we originally imagined.“

As the discussion continued, he revealed that during the development phase, the team even considered adding additional mechanics, fearing they might “run out of ideas with just this one simple little mechanic!” However, he encouraged the team to focus on the sliding tiles mechanic, adding “I think it forced us to be more creative than we would have been otherwise. This shows in some of the later puzzles.“

Possibility of more Tile Tiles games in the future, potentially exploring new mechanics

“We love stories! However, we don’t feel locked into any particular genre of game.” Mr. Mattingly described Tile Tales as a simple logic puzzle title, enhanced with a fun and silly little story. While talking about the studio’s broader vision, he revealed another game currently in development. “Our other working title is a point-n-click adventure game, which of course has a much more in-depth story to it,” he said.

He also shared his ambitions to work on other genres, including platformers, puzzlers, strategy, and even board games, while adding their elements to it. However, he shared real good news, stating that they “already have another Tile Tales adventure in mind” should Tile Tales become a hit. He is quite excited about the new one, stating it will be, “in a different world, with different characters and obstacles to contend with – perhaps even a new mechanic this time!

While reminiscing the lessons they learned, he explained that if the new game performs well, they are ready to make this a series, with more additions in the future. “We’ve got lots of ideas for new settings and characters to tell stories about, which could easily fit into more bite-sized puzzles,” Mr. Mattingly shared with great enthusiasm.

A balance between engaging puzzles and light-hearted storytelling

Coming to the puzzles and storytelling elements, Mr. Mattingly shared that he and Sophie primarily crafted the majority of the puzzle design. While designing, he also “incorporated a narrative into each chapter” alongside a mild overall story arch, which helps in syncing a few chapters together. “Occasionally we would tweak the puzzle to suit the narrative – but it was usually the other way around – puzzle first, and then story on top of that,” he explained.

He further explained the process, emphasizing that it is always easier to write a story that complements a puzzle rather than designing a puzzle to work with a specific story.”Puzzle design is the more challenging of the two skills,” he added.

As someone fond of easter eggs in games, I asked him whether Tile Tales: Pirate, has any. He said that while this game doesn’t include any easter eggs or hidden gems, one might “find a very specific reference to the Monkey Island series” in their other point-n-click adventure title.

Final Verdict from the Editor

Costing only $3.99, Tile Tales: Pirate is a great game that offers an absolute value-for-money experience. The game is highly engaging with immersive interactions with characters, beautiful biomes to explore, and entertaining cutscenes that enhance the main gameplay experience. With its uniquely stunning visuals and enjoyable gameplay, with so many challenging levels and content, it is a must-play title for any seeking a fun and memorable gameplay experience.

If you want to experience this beautiful game, you can do so by downloading it from the Google Play Store or the App Store for a price of $7.99. Moreover, the game will also launch on PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, and PlayStation 5 in the future.

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