Thank you so much Zed and Tyler. I appreciate the advice and help. I will try out your tips and hopefully get where I want to be. I have a lot to learn.

Can you elaborate? I don't see how I could put an 'Else' statement in there. When I add an else anywhere in there it says it's not valid.

Edit: Is this what you mean?

This did not solve the problem, unfortunately. The behavior is exactly the same.

I would think that if an animation needs to be triggered quickly the engine should be able to handle it. If I can only switch between an animation state every second and not any faster that's a total showstopper for any kind of action game.

I am trying to figure out if a small error in the way my player character transitions between animations is my fault or a bug in the way Construct handles the transitions.

The relevant code is here:

I don't think the rest of the code not shown would interfere with the above in any way.

Here is the problem. When I quickly transition between the Run_Shoot_Up and Run_Shoot_Down (by quickly rolling my thumb over up and down on the d-pad while continuously pressing right or left) my player character animation freezes in place while it continues to move. It does not do this when I press up and down more slowly, only when I do it quickly which leads me to believe it's an animation engine issue.

I have uploaded a short video as an example:

https://gfycat.com/RemarkableGloriousGoose

It's not a huge problem, but just looks wonky and I would expect a modern animation engine to do this properly.

Edit: I forgot to mention that this happens in both Construct 2 and 3.