While poking around, I saw an intriguing class named SKTileMapNode, and it turns out that SpriteKit has gained support for rectangular, isometric, and hexagonal tile maps since last year. Looks like I can drop all of the plans for GridMapKit and just use what’s there in the SDK already. Maybe I’ll still need some of it to implement the plans for hierarchical maps of different scale, e.g. world map, detailed terrain maps, and building/dungeon maps.

Oh, and there is new stuff in GameplayKit for creating noise maps as well. Almost everything I spent last Devember doing, and that I was planning to port to Swift this time around has since been implemented in the SDK. Time for major replanning, and reading up on documentation instead, to find what else there is that I don’t have to write myself anymore.