How to reuse sprites for shapes in a game like match3?

Question

Unity

Good afternoon, I study the game engine at my leisure and decided to write a simple game in the match3 genre for practice.
Suppose we have a playing field 10 by 10. Accordingly, in the cycle I create 100 shapes from the prefab. I also have a sprite (atlas) with 8 types of shapes. I want to allocate memory for 100 shapes and 8 sprites once, and as the player destroys them on the screen, change their type, position and sprite and display them again. How is this usually resolved? This suggests a simple solution to change the sprite through the code or use 8 states and change through the animation mechanism. But all methods seem crooked. How to solve it correctly?

Answer 1

Usually not sprites are cached, but entire gameobjects.
A cache controller is being made, which the GO that is not currently using turns off, but leaves on the stage. You need to create a new object - ask the controller to create, and he looks - whether he has an object of the desired type or not. If there is, just turn it on. If not, it creates a standard Instantiate.
In order not to change the sprite through the code, you can make not 1 prefab, but a prefab for each type of element for your game.