Wesley Matlock’s research while affiliated with Kansas City University and other places

In this chapter, you will explore the camera and different views from the camera. You’ll also learn about how the lighting of a scene works and the different type of lights that are available in SceneKit. Along with the lighting, you’ll learn about how the object’s material plays an important role in how the object is lit up and displayed to your user.

This chapter covers SpriteKit’s physics engine and collision detection.

Now that you have a basic understanding of how SceneKit works, you can now use the render loop to create, control, and animate SCNodes. In previous chapters, you’ve been using code to manipulate those objects.

In this chapter, we show you how to define particle emitters and how to leverage them in SpriteKit games. After that, we show you how you can use them to add engine exhaust to the playerNode whenever an impulse is applied to the physicsBody.

In this chapter you’ll learn how to implement scene transitions using SpriteKit’s SKTransition class. You’ll get a look at some of the different types of built-in transitions SpriteKit makes available to you. And you’ll see how you can control each scene during a transition. At the end of the chapter, you’ll take your newfound knowledge and add a menu scene to your SuperSpaceMan game.

So far in the game you haven’t moved the hero, and now you need to get him up on his feet and moving around. You’re going to keep this simple and use a one-finger touch to move forward and two fingers to move back.

In this chapter, you will start adding some real functionality to your game. You’ll begin by making some small changes to the current GameScene. After that, you will add additional orb nodes to collide into. You will then add scrolling to your scene, allowing you to make it look like the player is flying through space collecting orbs. Finally, you will start using the phone’s accelerometer to move the player along the x-axis.

In this chapter, we talk about using SKLabelNodes to add labels to your SpriteKit games. Specifically, we show you how to add a label that keeps up with the number of impulses remaining for the SuperSpaceMan to use, and then we show you how to add scoring to the game to keep up with the number of orbs the SuperSpaceMan has collected.

In this chapter, you will dive right in and create your own game. For this game you’ll make an homage to the classic Wolfenstein 3D game. First you’ll learn how to programmatically create a scene and add nodes into the scene. After you have a basic understanding of these principles, you’ll learn how to use the powerful SceneKit Editor in later chapters.

In this chapter, you will refactor the orb node’s layout one last time with the goal of enhancing playability.