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Trinagon first entered it's creators (my) imagination in 1988 or thereabouts (me being a teenager then)
At that time turbo pascal was the programming language we learned in school. There where none of those cool tools that make programming a breeze nowadays, but the base game could already run with VGA graphics (Anyone remember - 16 Colors at 640x480px).
There were no animations programmed whatsoever. Instead the colors where interchanged. The game could be played using the keyboard. It really was more of a programming excercise, but i thought the concept was pretty cool and well.... New.
The design was exactly like the base layout for the editor, 6 Rainbow colors around the hexagon grid with 9 triangles each.
I played the game about 10 times.
Then i decided, it was to easy to solve, and therefore sort of ... boring :/
No further designs were tried or variations, and the idea discarded as too simple.
Unfortunately the code (even though i do not have a turbo pascal compiler anymore) was not preserved throughout the years.
..
Many many years later, in 2015 seeing some puzzle games around, and maybe playing 'monument valley' and other 3dimensional puzzles, the old idea came back in a slightly different shape :
The same puzzle logic of adjacent interchangeable triangles, but wrapped around symetrical bodies (platonic ones especially).
A very short search led to a wonderful program & learning tool : Geogebra, which allows for 3 dimensional vector calculations and graphical representations and is very easy to learn and apply. (The above picture was made using Geogebra)
With geogebra the basic 3D shapes could be understood and visualized, but it also became clear that the game idea would not necessarily make sense, and really the idea did not seem sooo great, as to make the effort of learning how to program it in nowadays programming environment.
A short dabble into the unity editor made it clear that programming has become a very different kind of animal since 1988. Somehow much easier, with bigger concepts and structures in play that come out of the box, yet at the same time with a rather steep learning curve (unless you wanted to write Yet Another Monster Game).
This year (2018) finally there seemed to be enough time and interest to learn something new. Unity and c#, and some blender modelling started a process that did turn out to be much more interesting than anticipated.
The intention was really just the learning exercise, and the knowledge that, looking at the stupidity of some games out there, even an easy game can be an improvement. (Since then i have learned that it's not soooo easy after all).
Not even 2 months later the game was already playable, but just like its original still lacked something, until ..
the animations in 3D revealed a whole new world of possibilities !
When triangles were allowed to have two distinguishable sides (faces), and then also a direction, things got interesting indeed.
Suddenly a rather simple game evolved into a complex and diverse creation of many possibilities. Who would have thought of that !
To discover this world was and is a pleasure and it's a decent amount of work to develop the details. The process is still going on. The mathematics (group theory) on that example will be a pleasure to see, as will be the creation of many puzzles, and solving them and getting a better idea of the principles.
The actual idea from 2015, wrapping a 2D game over 3D bodies, was under construction throughout 2019 and has been published in Nov. 2019.
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The Real Value
This game intends to create clarity of thought & focus. Instead of mindless entertainment, we wish for mindful entertainment. Our preference for anyone playing is to discover the game, and their ingeniousness solving the puzzles. Sometimes discovering may need a bit more time.
The real value in all this : The joy of applying your intelligence instead of mindless tapping on the screen. The joy of understanding and achieving something. Not even necessarily proving yourself against someone else, but proving yourself to you. There is a value, that cannot be paid or bought !
You can still simply buy the game for really almost a penny or the price of a coffee !
We think this game is truly great, and we believe that we're selling it for much less than it can be worth to you.
We believe that your gain from solving these puzzles by far outshines the money spent, and it's never paid in money anyways.
It's value comes from effort and time and thinking.
It is a value YOU create, and we thank you for it !
Enjoy creating :)
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Trinagon puzzles are built from symmetry. The key is to understand which symmetry is actually at work.
Take the TStar. Remove the spike rotators. The remaining rotators are hexagonal.
Eg. 6 triangles around each rotator & a 2-fold overlaps between each rotator. Exactly like a hexagon playground.
So it's reasonable to assume we deal with a hexagonal puzzle.
Locally around each rotator this is correct. As long as you only use two rotators it still is.
Globally it is not : The spikes fold the hexagon in half.
A triangle has to move around a spike twice to come to the same state (face & direction), as moving once around the hex-rotators.
This holds true regardless of which rotators are in play.
It's one of those things that are (maybe only) obvious once they are known.
And this opens the door for some very tricky puzzles.
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The foundation of the trinagon system is symmetry.
Symmetry is too big a word to explore here.
It is found in nature, in mathematics, in 'chaos' and what we perceive as 'order', to name a few.
it is a principle that can give us insights into complex mechanics or processes, be they of the real (material, physical) or virtual (philosophical, social, mathematical ..) kind, without having to understand the exact workings of these.
And really just like that, we can enjoy symmetry. We can derive hypercomplex theories about them, or we can just ..
.. PLAY !
This is the game to give you that opportunity !
Trinagon is a permutation puzzle system.
Not just one puzzle, but many many puzzles that can be played on multiple playgrounds with miriad configurations / layouts / designs / patterns.
Symmetry has many many expressions :) Here you see another one.
Now, as of december 2019. with all the polyhedra in the game, and many clearly not so easy puzzles, finding the symetries is increasingly difficult.
Therefore, many of these puzzles have been designed using rogue play !
Once you find the perfect symetry, or partial symetries you will be able to solve them with a fraction of the original moves !