I’m trying to make a small fighting game in unity 3d for the first time, I have basic attacks but don’t know how to script and animate grapple moves. Do you temporarily merge objects and make a complete animation which can only be used when they are merged? Can that also be used to make a reversal system?
Likely you’ll need some animations and also some code to “stick” the character to the other character. You could make empty gameobjects in this case inside the attacker’s skeleton, and then when you go for a grapple attack, cache the original position, attach the character to the empty gameobject, let it play, then detach the player back at the original position.
Animations themselves won’t do anything without something to drive them, and I’d suggest possibly trying the empty gameobjects approach. Just make sure the animation sets match, so you don’t get weird animation behaviour (ie. if A goes to grapple, then B should have an defense or “try to escape from grapple” animation.
Case in point, I have an Asset Store asset that has a set of female characters and they have attack and “hit” animations (the ones where they get knocked back etc). They also have pickup and throw animations, along with a loop for when they are picked up (ie. arms and legs wailing, etc).
Hope this helps, I’m not that fluent in the fighting game section. 