I'm making a game that pretty much entirely consists of solid-colored rectangles. Currently, I'm using SKSpriteNodes for all of the rectangles in it, since they need to be animated and touched, but while creating a few hundred of them, I found them to cause a lot of lag.
All I need is a rectangle I can draw with a solid color, no textures or anything, but for some reason, these cause a lot of lag.
If possible, I want to avoid OpenGL as I tried it before and it took me months to do a single thing. I just feel like there must be a fast way that I can't find. Any help will be appreciated!
The simplicity of your skin (i.e. just a rectangle rather than a more complex image) is unlikely the cause of your performance problems. Consider experiences like this one animating 10k particles. Start with Instruments. That's how you find where your bottlenecks are. At these scales (100s), it is almost always an O(n^2) algorithm that has snuck into your system, not the act of drawing.