First things first
One thing about using SceneKit is that you get to use a "Scene Editor", that lets you inspect the scene and add new nodes to it.
The first thing I worked on was a way of getting the jet to move in various directions, and it was great to see that LightingShadows were just something you get for "free" depending on how you setup your scene:
It's also possible to get realtime reflections:
The cube faces are having some issues due to not having great support for Metal on the GPU I was using at the time. If you look at the shiny material of the jet you can make out the reflection of the white cube below it.
This is why I abandoned my own attempts at writing a game engine, stand on the shoulders of giants, and all that.