I believe I have finally finished my ongoing adventure in developing the player controller. It took a while, but the player is now moving in a way I like. There were two big things I had to change to make this happen. First I added coyote time to the jumping mechanics, which is when the game lets you jump for a short amount of time after walking off a platform. This greatly improves the game feel, since it makes it much easier to do running jumps or save yourself if you're about to fall down. Many of our playtesters found jumping difficult and this alleviates that.

The second thing I had to do was remove vertical friction from the geometry in the game. This took me forever to figure out, as all I knew was that the player character would often get stuck when running into walls and lose any vertical momentum. This made it hard to jump on platforms since running into anything would stop the player from rising. In the end, I discovered that Unity has a component designed for 2D platformers that removes vertical friction from the colliders. Attaching this to all the platforms fixed the problem perfectly.

These two changes may seem small, but they have drastically changed how easily it is to move around the level.