Unity Playmaker - Community Building an Arena Avoidance Game

In this Unity + Playmaker tutorial, I am starting an Arena avoidance game and asking for you, the community, to help me in building it. With this first iteration, I set up the base arena and a pattern for the fireballs to generate. I'm asking for you all to add more patterns and then share those b

This community-build tutorial starts an arena avoidance game where a central column shoots fireballs the player must dodge. Jerry builds the arena, the column with four spawn points, a self-destructing fireball prefab, and one firing pattern, then invites viewers to design more patterns through Discord. It is a solid template for bullet-pattern enemies.

Build the arena and fireball

Use ProBuilder to make a platform arena with a central enemy column, applying simple materials. Create a 3D sphere fireball at the origin, scaled to about 0.3, with a fireball material. Add an FSM named Move Fireball that translates it back on Z at a rate of 5 per second. Tag it enemy fireball and mark its sphere collider as a trigger so it can later detect the player.

Make the fireball self-destruct

After the translate, add a Short Wait of one second, then a Finished transition to a Destroy Self state that calls Destroy Self. Timing the cleanup rather than measuring distance keeps it simple. Reset the sphere to the origin and save it as a prefab so the spawner can create copies.

Place rotating spawn points

Inside the enemy column, add four empty spawn points centered on each indentation. Rotate each one on Y by 90, 180, and 270 degrees. Even though an empty shows no visible rotation, spawned fireballs inherit the parent's rotation, so each spawn point launches its fireball in a different direction around the column.

Create the firing pattern and loop it

On a game manager, add a column fire object with an FSM. A Pattern state does a short wait to let the player orient, then enters Pattern One. There, Rotate the enemy column by 10 degrees, then spawn a fireball at spawn point one, wait 0.1 seconds, and chain to the next spawn. Duplicate the spawn state so the names auto-increment to fireball 2, 3, and 4, each pointed at its spawn point. Add a Loop action set to 30 iterations that returns to Pattern One, then finishes back to the pattern chooser. The column now rotates and fires from all four points in sequence, thirty times, before pausing, a base other patterns can plug into.