# Explore the Engine

S&box uses a scene system to create games. We feel this is the easiest system for people to pick up, while still being powerful.

## The Scene System

### Scenes

A **Scene** is your game world. Everything that renders and updates in your game at one time should be in a scene. Scenes can be saved and loaded to disk.

### GameObjects

A scene contains multiple **GameObjects**. The GameObject is a world object which has a position, rotation and scale. They can be arranged in a hierarchy, so that children GameObjects move relative to their parents.

### Components

GameObjects can contain Components. A component provides modular functionality to a GameObject. For example, a GameObject might have a ModelRender component - which would render a model. It might also have a BoxCollider component - which would make it solid.

The game developer ultimately creates games by programming new Components and configuring scenes with GameObjects and Components.

![Prickly Pete running around with a knife](https://cdn.sbox.game/doc/getting-started/images/prickly-pete-running-around-with-a-knife.mp4)

## Play Testbed

Start s&box (not the editor) and find the game called `testbed`. This game is used by us to exhibit and test certain engine features, to make sure they work and keep working.

![Testbed](https://cdn.sbox.game/doc/getting-started/images/testbed.png)

When you enter the game you'll find a menu of scenes. Each scene tests a different engine feature.

Click a scene to enter it, have a play around, press escape to return to the main menu. You can hold escape to completely leave any game.

:::success
So here's what you just saw. The menu uses our UI system, which is like HTML with C# inside. It's basically Blazor, if you've ever heard of that.

When you clicked on a title, you entered a Scene. Our engine is Scene based, rather than map based like the regular Source Engine. Scenes are json files on disk, and are very fast to load and switch between - just like you experienced.

You probably saw a bunch of cool stuff. Here's something else cool — you can [download the source for that game here](https://github.com/Facepunch/sbox-scenestaging), which includes all the scenes. Once you download it just open the .sbproj file to open it in the s&box editor, then explore the different scenes in the Asset Browser.

You can edit the scenes and play with them locally to get a feel of how things work.
:::

## Next Steps

Now that you understand the basics, explore these areas of the documentation:

- **[Scenes & GameObjects](/dev/doc/scene)** — Deep dive into the scene system
- **[Code](/dev/doc/code)** — C# programming in s&box
- **[Editor](/dev/doc/editor)** — Learn the editor tools
- **[Systems](/dev/doc/systems)** — Input, networking, audio, and more