Introduction to SceneKit

Before diving into the development of the game, let's introduce SceneKit briefly.

What is SceneKit?

SceneKit is a rendering engine based on a hierarchy of nodes, similar to Sprite Kit. The most important kinds of nodes are lights, the camera, geometry objects, boxes, spheres, and so on. Actually, all of these are attributes of a node, but for the sake of simplicity of the mental model, let's consider these as different entities.

To these nodes, we can apply several actions, such as moving, rotating, and so on. We can also add a physical body to a node and put it into a physical world, which is again really similar to SpriteKit.

Building an empty scene

To get our feet wet, we'll use the playground again, as in the first chapter.

Let's start creating a new iOS playground called SceneKitPlayground and import the frameworks needed to perform our experiment:

import UIKit
import SceneKit
import XCPlayground

The latter is the framework that permits the display of the scene on the...