Swift 2 By Example

Introduction to SceneKit

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

What is SceneKit?

SceneKit is a rendering engine that's based on a hierarchy of nodes, a similar way to SpriteKit. 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 in the way we look at them, 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 ...