Devlog 1: thousands of glowing shapes, one iPhone, stable 60 fps

Hey, first devlog here. PolyTowerz just went live on PixelPicked, so I want to start with the problem that almost made me give up on the whole "everything is drawn in code" idea.

The game has no sprites. Every tower, enemy, projectile and explosion is a vector shape. In late waves that means thousands of nodes moving at once, and my early builds fell apart exactly when the game got exciting.

The profiler showed the boring truth: allocation churn. I was creating and destroying nodes nonstop.

Three fixes carried the whole game:

1. Pools for everything that appears often. Trail particles, explosion shards, damage numbers. Created once at startup, recycled forever.
2. Transform instead of redraw. Health bars just scale, they are never rebuilt.
3. A quadtree for targeting, so towers only look at nearby enemies instead of scanning the whole map.

Result: stable 60 fps on a phone, even when the screen is full of neon.

Next devlog: how the 7 hidden tower synergies work and why the game never explains them on purpose.

The game is free on iOS if you want to see it running. Feedback very welcome, I am one person and I read everything.