Video 4 - Anime Combat System - Combat Juice - Hitstop, Freeze Frame, Camera Shake

Video 3 - Directional evade + combos work cleanly with input buffering + enemy spawners

Video 2 - Data Driven Hit react system + Directional hit reacts for enemies + soft attack assist system for player + basic AI enemy loop

Video 1 - First pass combo system + weapon based hit detection + damage system

Anime combat system

I started writing a full anime style combat system from scratch in Unreal Engine 5 using only blueprints.
Working solo, I am developing this system to be very optimized and modular. So the system is based on animation montages and data asset driven workflows.

PLATFORM: PC TOOLS: Unreal Engine 5

  1. Built so FAr:

    PLAYER COMBAT FRAMEWORK

    • Combo Selection

    • Input Buffering

    • Cancel Windows

    • Data Asset Attack and Combo setups

    • Montage driven animation pipeline

    • Socket based hit detection per weapon

    • Per weapon damage type and stats

    • Modular weapon system

    • Targeting Magnet system to stick player attacks to nearby enemies

    ENEMY COMBAT FRAMEwork

    • Enemy Base BP and BT owns all logic

    • Child enemies are data assets only

    • Hit react data asset setup per enemy

    • Directional Hit Reacts

    • Core Behavior Tree for all enemies

    Combat juice

    • Hitstop

    • Freeze frames on finishers

    • Camera shake on certain attacks

    • Hit and death VFX

2. Architecture Overview

Design goals for the architecture:

  • Modular, data-first, minimal per-enemy or player action scripting.

  • Easy to add player attacks/ combos/ hit reactions/ enemy archetypes using data assets without touching core logic.

  • Quickly debuggable (debug tools, on-screen state) with centralized player and enemy logic.

3. DATA ASSET WORKFLOW

A. Attack Structure and Data assets

Each player attack can be defined with a data asset.

B. COMBO DATA

Each player combo can be made up of multiple Attack data assets as well as other additional data.

C. HIT REACT DATA

All the enemy hit react animations can be hooked up in a single hit react data asset per enemy. Makes iteration per enemy very fast.

D. ENEMY Data

Setting up each enemy archetype is as simple as creating a child BP of the Enemy Parent BP and tuning some data values.

4. Dev tools

A. Debug enemy spawner

Put together a quick tool for spawning in enemies in the level to quickly iterate on combat.