Scenes, Prefabs, and Assets

This guide explains how Sendama content is authored and assembled.

The Three Main Content Layers

Most Sendama games are built from three layers:

scenes that define the playable level or screen
prefabs that define reusable object templates
assets such as textures, tile maps, scripts, and events

If you keep those responsibilities separate, projects stay much easier to grow.

Scenes

A scene describes:

its name
its width and height
the environment tile map
the optional environment collision map
the hierarchy of objects created when the scene loads

The scene root is editable in the hierarchy and inspector.

Typical scene-level fields are:

Name
Width
Height
Environment Tile Map
Environment Collision Map

Use the tile map for visible background art and the collision map for environment blocking data.

Hierarchy And Nesting

Scene objects can now be nested.

Use nesting when you want:

logical grouping
relative transforms
reusable parent objects with attached parts
cleaner hierarchy organization

Common examples:

a Player with a child Weapon
an EnemySpawner parent with child marker objects
a HUD root with grouped UI children

In the editor:

drag one object onto another to parent it
drag it onto the scene row to make it a root object again
drag it onto empty space in the hierarchy to unparent it back to the root

As a rule of thumb, keep scene roots meaningful. Do not leave every object at the top level if it clearly belongs under another object.

Game Objects And UI Elements

The editor currently supports creating:

GameObject
UIElement variants such as Label and Text

For game objects, the most common editable areas are:

transform
renderer
attached components

For UI elements, the common editable areas are:

position
size
text content

Prefabs

A prefab is a reusable object definition stored as a .prefab.php file under Assets/Prefabs.

Use prefabs when:

you want to spawn multiple copies of the same object
you want scene data and runtime spawning to share one source of truth
you want to pool objects such as bullets, enemies, or pickups

You can create prefabs in several ways:

Assets -> Shift+A -> Prefab
sendama generate:prefab <name>
export an existing scene object with Hierarchy -> Shift+E

Prefab editing happens immediately. It does not wait for Ctrl+S.

Texture And Tile Map Assets

Two of the most important asset types are:

.texture for sprite art
.tmap for tile map layouts

Use the Sprite tab to edit them.

Typical pattern:

create a texture
draw the sprite in the Sprite tab
assign it to an object's renderer
set the renderer crop rectangle with Offset and Size

Renderer and scene paths are typically written as asset-relative paths such as:

Textures/player
Textures/player.texture
Maps/level
Maps/level.tmap

Script And Event Assets

Scripts and events are PHP classes that live under the project asset tree.

Use generated scripts for:

gameplay behaviors
input handling
timers
pooling logic
collision reactions

Use generated events when you want project-specific event types or event-driven systems.

The editor can generate these files, but the actual PHP logic is still written in code.

Asset Renames And Deletes

Be careful with file operations.

Renaming behavior:

happens immediately
preserves file extensions
can update in-memory scene references
still needs Ctrl+S if you want the updated scene references persisted

Deletion behavior:

happens immediately after confirmation
does not automatically repair broken references elsewhere