How to debug physics in a SpriteKit scene using showsPhysics

Swift version: 5.6

Paul Hudson @twostraws May 28th 2019

SpriteKit’s SKView class has a few built-in debugging options, of which two are enabled by default: showsFPS to show the current frames per second, and showsNodeCount to show how many nodes are currently in your scene.

If you’re having trouble understanding the way your physics objects are behaving, you should enable the showsPhysics option on your view, like this:

skView.showsPhysics = true

You can put that into GameViewController.swift if you’re using Xcode’s default SpriteKit template, alongside showsFPS and showsNodeCount.

When set to true, showsPhysics will automatically draw blue lines around all your physics shapes, allowing you to see them in exactly the same way as the physics engine does. Hopefully you’ll be able to see where you’ve made a mistake and can correct it quickly!