Every horde game needs enemies to appear somewhere , and the player should never see the

moment they appear. That sounds like one line of code. It took me five fixes to get a

spawner that doesn't pop enemies in on screen, inside walls, or outside the map. Here is

what each fix taught me.

Lesson 1: a fixed radius only works at one zoom level

The first version everybody writes picks a random angle around the player and pushes the

point out by a fixed distance:

@ export var spawn_radius : = 700.0

func _spawn_point () -> Vector2 : var angle : = randf () * TAU return player . global_position + Vector2 . RIGHT . rotated ( angle ) * spawn_radius

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It's fine as long as nothing changes. Then I zoomed the camera out for a boss and enemies

started popping in on screen. Later I tested on a wider window and it happened again.…