Best Practices

The getting-started guides cover how to do things; the API reference covers what exists. This section covers the part in between: which of several available approaches to reach for, and why. These are the opinions the engine's own development settled on — several of them learned the hard way during the modernization and platform-porting work, and written down here so you don't have to rediscover them.

Guide	The one-line opinion
Text Rendering	Default to bitmap fonts (CCLabelBMFont); dynamic system-font labels don't exist on every platform.
Content Pipeline or Not	Pick Cocos2D-Mono vs Cocos2D-Mono.Core by whether you use MGCB — and if you do, reference the MGCB task directly.
Collections & Allocation	Use CCRawList<T> (and its array pooling) in per-frame hot paths; use List<T> everywhere else.
Platform-Specific Code	Prefer runtime seams; when you must #if, guard on what you mean, never on what you exclude.
Saving Game Data	CCUserDefault for settings; your own format for game state; never CCNode.Serialize.
Scene & Node Lifecycle	Build in the constructor, activate in OnEnter, undo everything in OnExit.

Where a topic has a working demonstration in the samples repository or the in-repo test app, the guide links to it rather than restating the code.