Hi guys,I’m a begginner but I have as a long term goal the creation of a Devil May Cry kind of gameplay inside UE4,and for this I need a bit of your help and knowledge regarding the whole animation side.
So I’m in this only from few days (2-3) and basically all my knowledges are:
・Followed documentation called “How to Set Up Character Movement in Blueprints”
・Followed Zak Parrish’s 22 videos about creating a third person game
・Followed this tutorial about creating a basic walk cycle in 3ds max
・Followed official autodesk tutorials about using CAT
So currently I exported the mannequin from the “free animation pack” and I’m starting by making the walk animation myself inside 3ds max.
Thing is,I still miss the understanding of the full picture for what I want to create,I lack the knowledge of common pitfalls and things I should avoid,and here’s where I need your guidance.
Basically what I want to do is to lay this thing out in a way where I can add the pieces I do in a modular way still moving toward the final goal,because for instance,going in this blind I risk to do all the work piece by piece just to realize half way trough that I lay down everything in an incorrect way for the final goal I want to achieve and I have to start again from scratch…this is why I need the guidance of who sees already the big picture.
So for instance,this time I make the walk cycle,I test it inside UE4 and it works,next time I step up the challenge and do a roll animation and so on,but everything of this must be done with an organized structure behind,and I have no idea what this structure is like xD (info or videotutorial would be a huge help!)
Ultimately,I’ll have a third person gameplay,a character with an inventory and the ability to draw different weapons from it,3 different “combat stances” (dual grip sword,sword+staff,full magic and ofc a “no weapon stance”,for out of combat situations),ability to perform locks on targets,rolls,dash,jumps and multiple jumps in air (basically flying),combat on ground or while in air. Yep,this is basically Devil May Cry description,with the extra fly stuff and also the ability to switch between different armors (throwing that in just in case it affect something ).
So any knowledge you have about how I should be laying down everything since the beggining is very very welcome and will save me a lot of troubles in the long run for sure! 
Throw at me wathever knowledge you got! (please :o)
I think you’re on the right path in how you approached it so far and you should continue that way.
Developing games is almost never linear and what you did so far is a good way to prototype what you want to achieve. Ultimately, there are not so many general pitfalls, since it really depends on the exact goals you want to achieve. Also, sometimes the best learning experience is to fail at a certain point. Also most stuff just can be reused or altered without an impact on the entire chain, since UE4 and other engines too are not linear or destructive. The UE4 documentation as well as the answer hub should give you a good amount of information to start on most things.
For structure: Write things down and/or draw them. Get some “mood pictures” or other kind of references you want to achieve. Study them and look for solutions. Create a game design document, lists and the like to keep track of what you want to achieve at the end and then challenge the individual issues step by step.
Awesome to hear another hack n’ slash is joining the ranks…I’ve got some videos in my thread walking through how I went about starting…may help, may not but I’d think it would since DMC is quite an influence on my game as well…
Click the sig below…good luck either way…
Thx for the feedback guys 
@haldolium: I’ll do that for sure!
@President: Awesome stuff,subscribed to your channel! Though I’m very far behind so I’ll need to follow some more simple tutorial before I can catch up with the stuff you’re doing now and fully understand/benefit from your videos :o Keep them coming,and good luck to you too! 
This isn’t the advice you asked for but from one cuhrayzee dev to another, two pieces of advice I wish I had gotten early on:
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learn how to make Custom AnimNotifyStates. They are your friend. Notify states are guaranteed at the engine level to always fire a Begin function when they start and always fire an End function when they end, regardless of when in the notify state the anim actually starts and stops. For a game which relies heavily on animation canceling as a core mechanic like a DMC type game does, the ability to use these well is INVALUABLE, since it avoids the jillion corner-case bugs you have to track down when an animation montage is cancelled in a way you didn’t expect and the player gets stuck in some state or other.
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Tie ALL of your animation stuff to your underlying anims; curves, notifies, etc., tie them all to the individual anim files. Resist the temptation to tie them to anim montages. You’ll be using montages for most of your complex combo trees and the temptation will be there to make them home to all sorts of things (weapon trails and sound effects, hitbox and i-frame generation, etc), but if you do this, and you suddenly decide to go back and change any one of the anims in your combo in a way that alters its length (for example, giving it slightly more cooldown to add an optional attack-pause-attack tree) EVERY SUBSEQUENT ANIM, NOTIFY AND CURVE WILL BREAK. Keep that stuff in the anim assets themselves, so redoing an anim only means redoing that anim’s notifies.
I learned this last one the hard way.
That’s exactly the kind of advice I was looking for! 
Basically whatever knowledge that can potentially save me big troubles in the long run,and I can’t specifically ask about because I can’t know what I don’t know xD But that’s it,so thank you a lot for warning me 
Though it will be still some time before I can put those advice into practice because I wasn’t happy using the “mechanical” character mesh from the free animation pack to test my animations, so I decided to just start by doing the actual character,since I’ll have to do it anyway sooner or later 
http://i.imgur.com/ta1mKUE.png Still long way to go an lot to learn in the process (about anatomy,proper topology,good rigs & facial rig,skinning and animation…),but staying on topic on the animation side,since I got a glance on this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWifw8yigR8 about rigging muscles,I was considering once finished with everything else to use that method to do muscles on all his body.I mean,since my main goal is to improve,I might as well try to go for the long shot,even if the muscles would end up beign covered by armor 90% of the time. Would this be compatible with UE4 or would it cause any kind of problems?? 
I still have to look into it (and I will when I’m done with the modeling) so for now I would be happy even only knowing if this is doable or “doable with some c++ or some vodoo magic” or not doable at all. Let me know
