Chapter 7
Building Scenes with the Scene Editor

Now that you know how to build SpriteKit games programmatically, you’re ready to learn how to make games using the Scene Editor, Xcode’s powerful visual editor for creating scenes. While it’s possible to create your entire game in code, having access to a visual editor can help speed up your game’s development time.

With the Scene Editor, not only can you create your game scenes visually, but you can also reuse and share these scenes throughout your game by using reference nodes. You’ll learn more about reference nodes in ​Use Reference Nodes in Your Scene​, but for now, imagine you have an enemy monster or a heads-up-display (HUD) that you want to share across multiple levels. (A HUD is a transparent or semi-transparent overlay that provides information to the players, such as their score or health stats.) With reference nodes, you can do that.

In this chapter, you’ll step away from Gloop Drop, the game you built in Part 1, ​Build Your First Game with SpriteKit​, and you’ll focus on creating another game: Val’s Revenge. The image is a preview of the new game you’ll be building.

Val’s Revenge is a game that shares similar gameplay to that of Gauntlet, another popular arcade game from Atari. Recreating this 1985 classic hack and slash dungeon crawl makes for the perfect pairing of fun while learning your way around the Scene Editor. So, what are you waiting for? Let’s head into the dungeon.