Hi everyone!

First of all, to those who are reading this, I thank you for your interest and time. 
Developing this game came with a lot of challenges and hurdles, as it was the first time I committed to completing a project.
In this post, I would like to lay out the developmental history of the game, as well as some things I have learned.

Introduction:

I am a 20 year old part-time retail worker from Switzerland.
Throughout my teenage years I would constantly day-dream about creating my own project: be it a novel, comic, or a video game.
While growing up, video games were a pretty big part of my daily life, so the latter had a larger place in my heart.
Around the ages of 14 to 16, I occasionally dabbled with Unity,  but I always gave up. 
For some reason, I always told myself that I was "too stupid" to grasp programming or drawing.
I believe this was an excuse; I'm sure I was just seeking instant gratification, and gave up the moment I was faced with a hurdle. 
The only skill I was able to build at that time was 3D modeling — modeling furniture for backgrounds to be exact.
So then, I started seeking help from others for programming.
This never worked out,  I would always end up being ghosted.

Early last year (2020) I was working on a fighting game with a programmer. I served as the 3D modeler and character designer. 
I was fine with making a game that was only playable offline, but the programmer was very adamant about implementing rollback netcode.
It turned out to be a major challenge that we couldn't overcome, so he seemingly gave up — I haven't heard from him for a long time.

Phi's model was already finished; I put in a lot of time and effort into replicating the style of my favorite fighting game, but now the model would have to be shelved...
That thought was unbearable to me. I didn't want to shelve her to gather dust.
So I finally decided to take things into my own hand, and learn the necessary skills required to make a game.
The straw that broke the camel's back, as one might say.

Creating Phi's Model:

Thanks to the brilliant resources of @Rukikuri and @EpicKStudios,  learning the process of making anime styled 3D models went pretty smoothly. 
I don't want to get to deep into the process of making such models on here, as I consider myself to be a pretty bad teacher.

The style is achieved by shaping the head and facial features to look more 2D, and by editing normals for specific lighting that reflects anime. I also hard-modeled in highlights.
The best way to edit normals (or at least at the time) is to use a tool called "Abnormal," a normal editor

New resources (2021):

I haven't had to actually use any of these, but I saw creators that I follow make more simplified guides on the whole process:
Royal Skies is a great channel for modeling and rigging. His videos helped me a lot while making a rig for an old platformer prototype that I didn't finish.
I believe you should be able to achieve a very similar (or better) style following his new Anime Shading Tutorials.

Rigging:

I bought a rigging course called "The Art of Effective Rigging in Blender" from P2Design / Pierrick Picaut.
In retrospect, following Royal Skies tutorials would probably have sufficed, but the course is very in-depth, so I'm glad I bought it anyway.
Not much to say on this, everything went pretty well.

Unreal Engine 4 Programming:

I used Blueprint to code the entire game. 
Before getting started, however, I read a few articles, guides, books and watched tutorials on C# programming in Visual Studio.
It's not the same "language," but having some fundamentals down helped a lot. I would like to thank my friends B.Rouzouf, Korppi and Qwiblez for helping me understand some programming concepts.

Hit collision problems:

This is a big criticism I have with almost all "attacking" tutorials on YouTube:
Everybody seems to attach a capsule collider to a weapon mesh, and handle collision that way.
This method is very inaccurate and prone to bugging out; i.e, if the weapon is already colliding with the enemy, and you attack, then the collision is not recognized.

To circumvent this, as I tried doing things that way at first, I had to come up with my own solution:
Spawning actor-based Hitboxes:

Keep in mind that this gif is from July, so there might be differences to the finalized game.

Here's some Blueprint code:

I later realized that I can further improve and optimize this method, but I didn't deem it necessary to rewrite everything for this project.
Regardless, if you have any questions then feel free to ask!

Closing thoughts:

This post has gotten quite long, so I truly appreciate if you've read up to this point.
I'd like to issue out another thank you to Yoko Taro & Ryukishi07 for inspiring me to bring mere ideas to fruition.

Soulstopia -PHI-  is a single step in a long journey, so I hope you can look forwards to what's next!