Combat system issues

I intended on adding a combat system in the game, allowing the player to swing a sword to protect themselves and defeat the enemies as one of the objectives the player had to complete. I had added the sword to the player and created an animation of the sword swinging, but when I had added the code to call the animation, nothing seemed to happen, after many attempts to try fix it, nothing was working and with the deadline coming up I had no choice but to scrap the project.