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

In the previous chapters, you’ve worked within the SceneKit paradigm; however, Apple has created a way for you to add a 2D scene to overlay on your 3D scenes. In this chapter, you’ll add a 2D scene that will be used for your timer so it can track how long it will take you and your friends to find and capture the enemy.

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

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, you’ll learn how SceneKit uses the scene graph to render the objects in the scene. Once you have an understanding of the scene graph, you’ll then see how to use the built-in models from SceneKit. You’ll use the models to make obstacles in your game for the hero to avoid and for the enemy to hide behind.

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’ll learn some SpriteKit best practices; specifically, you’ll see how you can create your own subclasses of SKSpriteNode so that you can better reuse your nodes. You’ll then move on to changing your game to load all the sprites into a single texture atlas that you can reference when creating all future sprites. After that, you’ll move on to externalizing some of your game data so that designers and testers can change the game play. Finally, you’ll close out the chapter when you prune your node tree of all nodes that have fallen off the bottom of the screen.

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.

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

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’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.