I tried attaching this directly via Add Behavior onto the animation event, but it didn't work. Then I tried to attach it via an Animation Event and that didn't work either.

    public class SwordAttack : MonoBehaviour
    {


        void OnTriggerEnter(Collider other)
        {
            GameObject.Destroy(other);
        }
    }

It's supposed to just destroy the enemy on hit. I wanted to add more specific logic like death animations and knockback but that can wait until I understand how to do it.

Do I need to code it into when the actual attack is called in my main player script? I thought I could do I the way I tried above. Or is my code off?

I tried Googling a lot, but most of the tutorials start with adding a BoxCollider to represent the weapon and they use the OnCollision method instead. I was originally going to do that but I thought I could shortcut it (as in, the attack would only be active when I swung the sword, so I don't need to go to create a hitbox)

I also wanted to be able to write the method so that I could use it for both enemies and players, just that enemies would have 1 health (they just die) but the player would take damage.

So something simple for players like :

public void TakeDamage (int damage)
{
    currentLives--;

        // Check if lives are zero
        if (currentLives <= 0)
        {
            GameOver();
        }
}