Attack animation

I want to make a game with an actor, that attacks when i press on a button in 4 different directions. So when he is looking down he use a certain animation etc. But HOW?

It might help to know a bit about how you are doing your coding. Based on what you wrote, it sounds like looking down is an animation, so when attack is pressed, you can just see if the current animation for self is the looking down animation and do the attack accordingly from there.