Even though earlier I wanted to pursue ultimate freedom for creating platforms, I'm now thinking that it'll work for a very short game with very specific levels, but for a longer game you'd have to go for a more puzzle-like game. Fortunately for this collection I'm doing the former, but granting ultimate freedom does make it tricky to make levels. I don't want players to just skip past everything in a level by creating platforms above every obstacle.
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I added 2 tweaks to jumping. First is coyote time, which means when you run off a platform, you have a brief period of time where you can still jump. I don't remember where this term comes but it's intentionally friendly to the player. Then there's wall jumping, which wasn't too hard to do. One subtle thing is that player input is disabled very briefly when you're jumping away. But also, so far I haven't made any levels yet in this platformer, which means I'll have to spend the next few days of the week just making levels.
When I first tried out scrolling to access your platforms, it felt way too fast and imprecise. It was way too easy to scroll past what you wanted. At first this made me give up and consider other options, like having your 2nd hand press extra keys on the keyboard. I thought that since Celeste does something similar I could get used to it, but no, one of your hands also has to use your mouse too. If humans grew a 3rd arm then maybe, but it's way too hard with only 2.
Which is why I went back to scrolling. Since games like Minecraft make it work, surely there's a way to make it work here too. The solution was to add a delay to the code checking your mouse's scroll wheel. Once you scroll, it won't register any other scrolling you do for the next 0.05 seconds. That tiny delay makes the scrolling much more manageable.
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