I am making a game for my psychology lab that has different scenes (jungle, sea, desert, moon, dungeon ect.) but the character behavior for each scene is essentially the same. Is it possible to write a class that will have all of the essential behaviors and animations that every sprite will need and then have subclasses that inherit from this class (I would only want to change the sprites image based on the scene in each subclass).
Sorry for late the answer, but I didn't see this until now. What you are after can fairly easily be achieved in Spritebuilder, without the need of subclassing. At least, it works well if your characters are composed of a CCNode with animated sprites. Lets say you have a ccb file set up with all the animations called JungleCharacter:
Right click the JungleCharacter file and choose "Duplicate". Now, in the new file (lets say we call it SeaCharacter) you select each sprite and in the 'Item properties' pane (on the right hand side) you can change the sprite frame. So, if you'd have a sprite frame called "JungleCharacterLeftArm.png", you'd change it to the equivalent "SeaCharacterLeftArm.png".
If it's to tiresome to do this in Spritebuilder, you could opt to do it in your favorite text editor, since ccb files are xml files. You'll find them in the "Packages/SpriteBuilder Resources.sbpack" folder (right click and select "show package contents"). If you set up your image assets in a smart way like "Jungle/LeftArm.png", "Sea/LeftArm.png" you can then do a quick find and replace, replacing "Jungle" with "Sea" (you get the idea).
Hope this helps!