"Trominoes" is an idea I had for a drop-and-arrange puzzle game based around the principle of three-squared polyominoes. This is not quite a Tetris clone, but it's vaguely similar. Tetris is based around the same principle using tetrominoes, which are four-squared pieces. The objective of this game is to align three colored squares vertically, horizontally or diagonally. Unlike Tetris, you cannot clear lines. There are three different colored-squares, each appearing randomly in three-square formations:



The gray square has the most common appearance, while the white square has the second most common, and the darker square has the rarest appearance.

Play takes place on a 9x11 grid. Formations can be freely rotated in any direction. When the grid fills and obstructs the appearance of any additional formations, the player loses.

"Free" squares (in formations U and L) will break away from the rest of the formation when placed, allowing them to be arranged independently. There is also a gravity algorithm which allows orphaned squares to fall into niches when surrounding squares are cleared from the board.

If the player clears 5 squares of the same color simultaneously, (for example: in X or + patterns) then all squares of that color will be removed from the board. (mechanic borrowed from Tetris Flash) Squares that are cleared as the result of gravity-chaining will provide an accumulating score bonus.

Wow, that's a cool idea!  I just have one question: Is it two players on one calc, or does the screenshot show it when it's linked?

Excellent idea as always, Zera!

Ztrumpet you mean Zera, right?

I suppose it would be a 2-player linked game. I can imagine the difficulty of trying to manuever with a single calculator...

No idea about the coding language. It's just a concept. If someone *wants* to code it, they're welcome to do so in whatever language they think is suitable.

I suppose it would be a 2-player linked game. I can imagine the difficulty of trying to manuever with a single calculator...

Yeah , I did such game once and it was hectic cuz the keypad is so small . Just computer games where two people use the keyboard at once are hectic to play.

Language-wise, since it looks like 4 level grayscale support in Axe is too slow (having to cycle through tilesets and refresh the tilemap every frame) and that in xLIB/Celtic, only the static stuff can be grayscale, the rest monochrome, I would say z80 assembly for now.

mhmm, at 3 level, it could maybe be feasible, not sure, but I think it could. Once the blocks are stuck on the floor, though, there might be a flash occuring when storing them in the screen. Same would probably go for the score. Basically, the game would have to render only two gray things at once. First, the

Btw for some reasons I kinda like the 2nd mockup better, I guess it could be because of the details, though. There would probably need to be some major thinking before attempting to pull this off using Axe. In BASIC, grayscale will be impossible with linking ability, because sending a variable will freeze the grayscale for about half a second everytime, due to the slow Asm( command. If Celtic III had linking capabilities like ZCOM, it could probably be fast enough, though. I think such project might be best in ASM or to a lesser extent, Axe

I could see this being possible in axe.  The power of the greyscale will have to be proven first though.  I think the speed of asm is mostly needed when doing things like multiple objects and crazy stuff like greyscale

After thinking, In TI-BASIC+xLIB/Celtic, the game design would most likely have to look like this: