Throughout FIEA the art track has industry reviews that represent the midterm and final for each semester. This was an animation based gameplay sample I made for the first industry review.
The player character is doing a few things in this sample. The primary thing is that red debug line that shoots from the characters finger tip. That line is a ray trace also known as a line trace. It allows the player character to talk to anything that line intersects with. In the above example it's the barrels.
The barrels are listening and will react when that ray trace hits them. In the above sample they smoke for a bit to confirm being hit then explode. Like the barrels the player character is also listening from the animation thanks to anim notifies. Basically at a special frame of the animation a call is sent to the player character telling it to shoot.