Is using states optimal?

Hey fellow game devloppers,
I’m making my first project on unreal, it’s a first person, multiplayer, 3D game (yes, I know I didn’t made my life easy with that lmao).

So, after prototyping the main features of the game, I quickly realised that I was going to need a lot of animations for a bunch of stuff. I never quite realized how many different animations games where having, but you basically need an animation for everything!

I know this is obvious, but I didn’t think about it.
As a blender user, I am familiar with keyframes and graph but I have never been really good at animating, but thanksfully, unreal has a bunch of features to help me with that.

So, I made my first animation, to make something easy, I decided to do an inspect animation, where the character inspects the item he has in the hands. It took me a few minutes (hmhm, hours…) but I got it done, then I started to implement the logic for it in my blueprint.

That’s where my question lies, I want to do things the right way to save the futur me from potential issues.

Right now, for my inspect animation, I made a boolean state in my BP called “is inspecting”
that is switched on or off at the press of a key.
like so :
image

Then, on the default animation blueprint that comes with the first person template, I added
the code to get this value :

and finaly, I use states to put the right animation when the boolean is true / false like so :

However, this feels wrong, I can already see that, if I do things like this, I will likely end up with a lot of states for all the animations of the character, like :

  • chopping wood
  • mining
  • holding a gun
  • reloading
  • knife

In my head, I was even planning on adding a lot of random fun features to interact with the other players that are not directly related to the main gameplay, but having different states for all of them and doing flip flops seems wrong.

Am I doing the right thing? I don’t mind having a lot of states etc… I just don’t want this to become a potential issue in the futur.

thank you for your help,
Louis

EDIT: I will soon switch to using gameplay tags for my states to keep them organized but the issue stays the same