---
title: "Projectile Patterns"
package: "@phaser-ae/projectile-patterns"
tier: Free
version: 3.0.0-3
released: 2026-10-14
updated: 2026-10-20
description: "Aimed, fan, ring, spiral, burst and staged volleys of projectiles, with swept hits, piercing, ricochet, homing and graze events, independent of any renderer."
url: https://phaser.io/packs/projectile-patterns
site: Phaser - https://phaser.io
---

# Projectile Patterns

Aimed, fan, ring, spiral, burst and staged volleys, with swept hits, piercing, ricochet, homing and grazes. It moves
the projectiles and reports what they hit; your game draws them and decides what a hit costs.

## What it does

`createProjectiles` gives you a projectile system. You `emit` a pattern from a point along an aim for a team, with the
damage each shot carries, and the system schedules every launch: a fan or a ring leaves at once, a burst or a spiral
one shot at a time, and a staged pattern ring after ring. `patternShots` returns the same schedule as plain times and
angles if you want to drive your own bullets.

Each `tick` moves the shots in substeps of at most 1/120 second and tests their swept path against circular targets
and rectangular walls, so a fast shot cannot pass through a target or a wall between frames. A shot ignores targets
of its own team, hits and grazes each target at most once, passes through as many extra targets as its pierce allows,
and bounces off walls while it has ricochets left. Homing shots turn toward the nearest living target of another team
at a limited rate.

Everything that happens comes out of `drain` as an event: `spawn`, `hit` with its damage, `graze`, `bounce` and
`expired`. The pack never changes anyone's health, so it fits whatever combat rules you use, and `snapshot` and
`restore` include the launches still waiting.

## Features

- **Six patterns** — `aimed`, `fan`, `ring`, `spiral`, `burst` and `staged`, with count, spread, interval, stages and
  rotation set explicitly.
- **Swept hits** — continuous tests against circles and rectangles in short substeps, with no tunnelling.
- **Piercing and ricochet** — a count of extra targets to pass through and of wall bounces.
- **Homing** — a turn rate toward the nearest living enemy, from the `actors` pack's steering.
- **Grazes** — near-miss events within a distance you choose, each target once per shot.
- **Teams, events and snapshots** — friendly fire ignored by team, events for damage, sound and effects, and full
  snapshot and restore.

## Good for

- **Bullet-pattern shooters**, where enemies fire rings, spirals and staged waves to dodge, with grazes for score.
- **Room-by-room robot shooters** in the style of Berzerk, with aimed shots and walls that stop them.
- **Twin-stick arena shooters** in the style of Robotron, with player and enemy shots kept apart by team.
- **Top-down action games** with piercing lances, ricocheting bolts and homing missiles.

## Make it yours

Every volley is an explicit definition: the kind, the count per volley or per ring, the speed, the fan's spread, the
interval between shots or rings, the number of stages, the turn per shot or ring, each projectile's radius and life,
and its pierce, ricochet and homing. The damage and team go with each emit, and the graze distance with each tick.

Two different uses: an enemy that fires a staged pattern of three rotating rings of twelve slow shots for the player
to weave through, scoring a graze for every close pass; or a player's gun that fires a five-shot fan of fast,
piercing shots that bounce once off the arena walls.

## A quick look

A fan of five piercing shots, ticked against the hero:

```ts
import {createProjectiles} from '@phaser-ae/projectile-patterns';
const shots = createProjectiles();
shots.emit({kind:'fan', count:5, spread:1, speed:180, life:4, pierce:1},
  {x:100,y:100}, Math.PI/2, 'enemy', 10);
shots.tick(1/60, [{id:'hero',team:'hero',x:100,y:150,r:12,alive:true}], []);
const events = shots.drain();
```

## Works with

- `actors` — required: the homing steering.
- `combat-rules` — damage, armour and shields, a ready combat layer to apply hit events to.
- `platform-hazards` — for enemy shots in side-view platform games over a tile map.

## Good to know

- Projectiles and targets are circles and walls are axis-aligned rectangles; there is no 3D or mesh collision.
- A volley holds 1 to 256 shots, and there is no cap on shots in flight, so a game should bound its own population.
- Hits report damage but never apply it.

---

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