Is GameScene.sks not recommended for game building? [closed]

Question

In nearly every tutorial for beginner SpriteKit game making I've seen, people delete the GameScene.sks with no real explination.

The reason why building simple non-game apps is so beginner friendly is because of the Storyboard.

Ray uses the GameScene here:

http://www.raywenderlich.com/84341/create-breakout-game-sprite-kit-swift

Is there any reason why NOT to use this tool? Writing out EVERYTHING in code is a little more daunting when you have this tool sitting right here that seems to simplify it a bit.. but I'd rather avoid it if it's better to do so.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

It's all personal preference really. I think the reason why people delete it though (at least in my opinion) is due to the following reasons:

1. You have to specify an initial scene size in the file. Whereas if you create the scene programmatically you can set the size to the view size.
2. The editor is very limiting. Xcode 7 however greatly expands the editor to include much more such as custom classes.
3. There were some pretty big bugs/crashes in the initial release of Xcode 6.
4. When learning Sprite Kit it's good to know how to programmatically do things instead of doing it visually. This is because games often have dynamic gameplay so you will certainly have to do things programmatically (especially when you consider the limitations of the Xcode 6 editor).
5. Some people (including myself) may use their own custom editor for designing levels etc. Whereas interface builder is standard because it has become very powerful over the years and works perfectly with UIKit.