And with iOS 7—and Mavericks—comes Sprite Kit, which contains everything developers need to write a 2D game from scratch, without having to worry about OpenGL.

The game’s sprite layering also helped environments feel deep without ever leaving the 2D plane, from the crumbling walls of Sigma’s fortress to the rain-slicked rooftops of the opening stage.

Everything is laid out as it was in the 1996 Game Boy originals, but there’s no sign of what a Pokémon battle might look like – although considering HD-2D games still use 2D sprites for their ...

If you’re a game developer crafting 2D games on Mac OS X, you might be interested in Sugar Cube Software’s Cocoa Sprite Kit (CSK).

The game has been remade in “HD-2D,” a kind of style template within Unreal Engine that Square Enix created, alongside developer Acquire, for 2018’s superb retro RPG Octopath Traveler.