It does start immediately when the countdown happens, it just can't do it quickly enough for the number of tiles there are. There's three modes in the game: Es

It does start immediately when the countdown happens, it just can't do it quickly enough for the number of tiles there are. There's three modes in the game: Escape, Survive, Explore. The Explore mode uses a much smaller radius and no countdown, and doesn't suffer from the same issue. Instead of thousands of tiles on the board there's hundreds. It was interesting playing with different mechanisms for drawing the tiles though. Between pre-generated letters, real-time letter drawing and everything in-between, the solution we have works well on most models of Apple devices. Some of the issues were also with how SpriteKit did certain things (such as how inefficient cloning a text node object is)