Hacker News Reader

Comment by kennu | Hacker News Reader

Personally, after playing around with all kinds of game engines and frameworks, I always go back to Unity. It has a lot of warts and issues, but for me it's the most productive way to focus on actually creating games.

View on HN

Have you tried SpriteKit? I chose SpriteKit with Swift for my first game and like it quite a lot, but I keep wondering if it was a good choice to limit myself to iOS.

What I'm interested in mostly is if I at least got a significant performance gain from chosing SpriteKit over Unity.

Try Cocos2d-x which is a multiplatform C++ implementation of the old Cocos2d-iPhone, SpriteKit was, at least partially, inspired from Cocos2d-iPhone.

The same author is working in Cocos2d-x and Cocos2d-iPhone, although Cocos2d-x is not owned by him.

    The same author is working in Cocos2d-x and Cocos2d-iPhone

That was in the past, AFAIK Ricardo works only on Cocos2d-x now. Cocos2d-iPhone is community driven now.

I'm not sure about the performance differences, but there was a different reason that kept me away from switching to Unity. I've built a couple games in SpriteKit doing it entirely programmatically in code and realized Unity is not setup to work that way at all. If you have experience using SpriteKit Scene Editor then you might not be bothered by that, but I was. Instead of Unity I'm using MonoGame now since it is meant to build the game using just code and I find it was a lot easier to jump into using my existing knowledge from SpriteKit

Reply on news.ycombinator.com