Wave After Wave: Creating an Enemy Swarm System in Unity

A wave system controls how enemies spawn in rounds, increasing difficulty over time. In this guide, we’ll set up a simple wave-based spawner in Unity with UI updates and countdowns between waves.

-We have to add two TextMeshPro — UI elements inside the Canvas:

1.-WaveCounterText

• Shows the current wave number
• Anchored to top right
• Font size around 36+
• Start with any text (e.g. “Wave: 1”)

2.-CountDownText

• Displays countdown between waves: “Next wave in: 5… 4…”
• Anchored to middle center
• Large font (e.g., 40–60)
• Leave blank initially
• You can also disable the object in the Inspector at the start

Now we go to the UIManager script.-

Add these variables.-

Then in the Inspector (Canvas selected):

• Drag WaveCounterText from Hierarchy to _waveCounterText
• Drag CountDownText to _countdownText

Then, we can add some methods.-

We’ll call these methods from SpawnManager to control the wave UI and also add some variables and a Coroutine that handles spawning enemies in waves,waits between spawns, and triggers countdowns between waves.-