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I'm making a puzzle game in the style of Tetris Attack (a.k.a Panel-de-Pon)/ Pokemon Puzzle League/ Poker Smash, so if you know those games, you'll know what I'm going on about below. It's basically a tile switching, match 3 (or more) game (PPL vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SH6rzYqXlb0&t=952s)

So I've come quite far and it's coming together but I'm really fighting the thermo on gameplay. With a full grid of tiles I'm running near enough 100 tiles (and after a lot of testing, I think the grid does need to be that big). Those consist of 5 different tile types that are all being emitted into the grid. Each tile has exactly the same logic, with the exception that a red tile has a 'tag_Red' tag, a blue has a 'tag_Blue' tag etc...and each has trigger zones looking for other tags of its own colour.

So while I've done a lot of work to simplify the tile logic as much as possible, even with what little I have in place I find that by the time the grid is close to full, my gameplay is running at about 90% and I'm getting slow-down messages........and I haven't even added two of the main game mechanics or any scoring system yet!

I think one of the main issues may those trigger zones that I mentioned above. Each tile has one looking horizontally to see if its two right-hand neighbours are the same colour as itself. And there's another zone looking up to see if the two tiles above it are the same colour...and these zones are the basis of my 'Match 3' mechanic.

I can't think of another way to implement the match 3 system but I'm sure that if I could find a way of doing it that didn't involve giving every single tile those 2 trigger zones, it'd probably save me a lot of gameplay thermo. So I'm wondering if anyone else may have an idea of some other way to achieve it that could be handled by the central game logic, rather than adding the logic to all the tiles.

Would really appreciate any help and thoughts on this as I'm close to putting something together that should work really quite nicely.