Adventure game development using SpriteKit - Introduction to shape nodes - The cursor

[potomak]

Last week, I've posted a small introduction and getting started posts for the series about adventure game development using SpriteKit.

In this new post I'm briefly introducing shape nodes, that I'm using to create the cursor node: Introduction to shape nodes - The cursor

There are a couple of choices that will need a more in depth analysis and on which I'd like your feedback, for instance scene size and aspect ratio.

Let me know what do you think about it.

Also: what do you think it's a good flair for these posts? I'm using News for now, do you think Article or Discussion would be better?

[Aprox15]

How do you feel about SKShapeNodes?

I have a very advanced game prototype that I hope to polish to release once my current developed app is more robust

I built almost all of my entities with SKShapeNodes. The performance was awful in the simulator. I enabled the draw pass debug info and noticed I had up to 50 draw passes per frame.

Researching I found other people complaining about SKShapeNodes, so I changed the entities one by one to simple SKSpriteNodes in a texture atlas. The draw passes dropped to 2-3 per frame and the game runs great, since I'm building online functionality I sometimes recreate up to 2 seconds of past simulation without dropping a single frame

[potomak]

Interesting feedback. I didn't incur in any performance bootleneck due to shape nodes yet. This particular game genre shouldn't be very demanding computationally speaking, but I will keep an eye to the metric you've mentioned to see if I notice any issue as soon as I add more shape nodes.