Infinity Series | Top Down Locomotion & Combat #8: Player Melee Combat
http://www.InfinityPBR.com
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/403445/
In this video, I go over a different way of doing attack checking. For the Mushroom Monster in the previous videos, we simply used collision. However, there's a potential for a player weapon to miss colliding with an enemy, if the weapon ends up before the collider in one frame, and after it in the next. Slower frame rates (like on mobile), or thin colliders (like on a skinny enemy), can easily make this happen.
So instead, I use two "Weapon Points" on the player weapon -- one on the base, and one on the tip. During the "Attack Check" phase, we do a RaycastAll command on the line between the base & tip, and between the previous position of each and the current position of each.
This creates a sort of "C" shape, and greatly increases the chances that enemies who fall into the zone between the sword on subsequent frames will still be found as "hit".
I also use a Random Number variable to ensure that each enemy is only hit once during any given swing of the player weapon.