How many movements can you program to button to charcter design

I have an idea for a game where a character uses poses that includes the motion swing of bat/ hockey stick and soccer/ football kick. What I’m trying accomplish is , If have a character, gets near a baseball bat or hockey stick. Better yet, the game Uncharted. When drake grabs a weapon his stance changes, when he picks up small hand gun to assault rifle to bazooka. How much codding is involved with it and how would I start? And how many motion can you program on a gamepad?

Any given button can do as many things as you want… it just gets more and more messy, especially with ambiguous situations. All a button press does is calls a function, and all a button release does is calls another function. Typically, these functions don’t do much… just change a variable from false to true (or true to false). Your Tick() function then sees which variables are true… which means the button is being held down at that moment… and does whatever logic makes sense.

This could be kicking off a particle simulation and sound effect while the button is held down (ie: starts when the variable is true, and stops when it’s false). Maybe it does that when the character is standing still, but makes them sprint when they’re already moving? If so, your logic would check whether the player is moving or standing still… somehow. It could check their velocity… or maybe just checking if the movement stick is center is sufficient. etc. etc. etc. All of that logic is written by you, and it only depends on what feels good to the player.

Here’s an introduction to Blueprints: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFXMW_UEDco&list=PLZlv_N0_O1gY35ezlSQn1sWOGfh4C7ewO

The video series works toward button presses, then moves on to components and so forth.

Since this is the C++ forum, I’ll add an equivalent C++ playlist… but you might want to try Blueprints first: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSRov77hNR4&list=PLZlv_N0_O1gYup-gvJtMsgJqnEB_dGiM4

Understanding how a video game works is a bit complicated at first… but you’ll figure it out. Start small, though… like trying to make Tic-Tac-Toe by clicking on cubes to turn their color blue or red… then checking if a line of blue or red is found.