A top-down survival combat prototype with melee and magic attacks, Animation Montages, and enemy AI — taught step by step in Spanish.
This project is a top-down survival combat prototype built entirely in Blueprints with Unreal Engine 4, developed following this Udemy course. The player fights enemies using melee attacks and magic projectiles, with the goal of eliminating all enemies to survive. The development playlist was recorded in Spanish. The key technical focus is the integration of Animation Montages with combat gameplay — how attacks drive animation, and how animation drives gameplay events back.
You can watch the complete teaching playlist here (in Spanish): YouTube Playlist
You can also watch a demo here: YouTube
Top-Down Perspective and Mouse-Aimed Combat
The top-down camera positions itself directly above the player, providing a full overhead view of the combat arena and all enemies simultaneously. As covered in the Zombie Top-Down Shooter project, this perspective changes the aiming model fundamentally: the player aims with the mouse cursor rather than the camera. The character rotates to face the cursor position at all times — during melee, this means the player turns toward their target; during magic, this means the projectile fires toward wherever the cursor points.
This persistent mouse-facing behavior is what distinguishes top-down combat from third-person combat architecturally. The character’s rotation is driven by the cursor’s world position rather than by movement input, which means the player can move in one direction while facing and attacking in another — a spatial awareness advantage that the overhead view enables.
Two Attack Types: Melee and Magic
The two attack types create a natural combat range dichotomy: melee requires closing distance to the enemy, while magic allows attacking from a safe distance at the cost of resource management. This tension — when to engage close and when to stay back — is the core decision loop of the combat.
Melee attacks use the Animation Montage and notify-gated hitbox pattern: the attack Montage plays when the player inputs the melee command, a notify activates the hitbox during the strike frames, and damage is applied to any enemy within the hitbox volume during that window. The character must be facing the enemy for the hitbox to connect, which the mouse-facing behavior handles automatically.
Magic projectiles spawn a physics actor at the player’s position and fire it in the direction the character is facing — toward the cursor’s world position. The projectile travels across the arena and applies damage on contact with an enemy. Magic introduces a resource or cooldown constraint — if it could be spammed indefinitely, melee would lose its purpose entirely. The cooldown forces the player to mix both attack types rather than defaulting to the safer ranged option at all times.
Animation Montages: Synchronizing Combat and Animation
The Animation Montage is Unreal’s system for playing gameplay-triggered animations that interrupt the character’s normal locomotion state machine. In a top-down game, this is particularly important because the character is constantly rotating to face the mouse — a melee attack played without Montage control would fight with the rotation logic and produce disorienting results.
The Montage temporarily takes control of the relevant animation layers during the attack duration. The character still moves and rotates as normal, but the attack animation plays on top, synchronized to the player’s input event. Notifies placed on the Montage timeline fire the gameplay events — hitbox activation, projectile spawn — at the correct animation frames.
Hit reactions on enemies are also Montage-driven: when an enemy takes damage, a brief stagger animation plays, providing visual confirmation that the hit registered. This feedback is critical for top-down combat where the overhead perspective can make it harder to read individual hits than in a closer third-person view.
Enemy AI
The enemy AI uses Behavior Trees to manage the detect-pursue-attack loop. In a top-down context, multiple enemies pursuing simultaneously is immediately visible to the player — the overhead view shows every enemy’s position and path at all times. This transparency changes the difficulty model: the challenge isn’t that enemies are hard to see, but that the player must manage multiple simultaneous threats while maintaining safe positioning and managing their attack cooldowns.
Enemy attacks use the same Montage system as the player — each enemy has its own attack animation with notifies that activate the damage event at the correct frame, keeping the combat visually honest on both sides.
Teaching in Spanish
The development playlist for this project was recorded in Spanish — a reflection of the learning context at the time, following a Spanish-language course. This is the clearest marker in the series of the early learning journey: Spanish resources, Spanish teaching, foundational systems. The subsequent playlists shifted to English as the projects grew in complexity.
Reflection
The Survival Game is the earliest combat project in the series and the first to use Animation Montages — a system that appears in every subsequent combat project in progressively more sophisticated forms. The top-down perspective adds a spatial reading challenge that third-person combat doesn’t have: the player sees everything simultaneously, which raises the cognitive demand of managing multiple enemies while switching between melee and magic based on positioning. That combination — overhead visibility, two attack ranges, and wave-based enemy pressure — produces a combat loop more tactically demanding than its simple implementation suggests.
Nicolás Bertoa 
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