hello everyone, I'm new to godot 4 and I don't understand a little how timers work, I want the enemy to have a defeat animation before death, but when I try to do something with it, he either dies instantly or does not die at all and plays the animation endlessly failure, please help!

https://github.com/jskxlanejx/gdscript-------suka

	if health <= 0:
		$death.start()
		$AnimatedSprite2D.play("death")
		print(global.nborn_die)
		if can_die == true:
			self.queue_free()

I can't see your whole project, but it looks like you're deleting the death node before its animation finishes. That is typically solved by connecting the animation_finished signal to a function and moving the queue_free() there.

This may be as simple as deleting:

if can_die == true:
	self.queue_free()

and replacing:

can_die = true

with:

set_physics_process(false)
queue_free()

Another problem is that $death.start() might be getting called repeatedly.

If the above call to set_physics_process(false) doesn't prevent that, you could add a boolean flag dying, which is initialized to false, and set to true in _on_death_timeout(). At the beginning of _physics_process(), check the flag, and return if it's true.