Of course you can, there are some level examples, and gameplay mechanics implemented in sister projects SuperMarioClone (C#) and PythonPlatformer (Python)
I don't know what you did wrong without taking a peek at your project. However keep in mind that tilengine is a graphics engine to program video game graphics with it, it doesn't provide any ready-made assets collection, only the assets used by the examples themselves. There isn't any sonic sprite pack, you have to build your own.