Forgiveness Mechanics: Reading Minds for Responsive Gameplay

coyote jump: replace "can jump" booleans with timers. adds forgiveness so when you were rightly falling off a cliff, you can still make the jump because you expected to be able to.

cable stretch: target for a projectile is locked when triggered, and the player moving due to physics does not cause the projectile to go out of range.

input buffering: store inputs in a buffer and process them when they become valid; ex. if you try to jump before you finish a landing, the player should jump if they hit the ground within the next T seconds.

Using inputs to cancel others: jumping cancels "fall through" mode to avoid jumping and falling through platforms you tried to stand on.

Conditional inputs: fall through mode can only be turned on when standing on the ground; otherwise players could activate it mid-jump and fall through a safety object in to a spike trap

Input speedbump: count-up timer for destructive controls like restarting a level; button must be held for some number of seconds.

Hitbox pinching: squish the hitbox in certain ways for vertical or horizontal movement to make movement easier. for example thinner boxes while jumping, full size box for falling, shorter box for running, while pushing the character so their full size hitbox is in an allowable position. makes it so you can run over small gaps or jump up narrow holes with less frustration.

pickup magnetism: if you get "close enough" to an item, it goes in to "magnet mode" where it flies toward the player until they pick it up

generous hitboxes: good items have large rectangles, bad items are smaller circles

player-biased decision trees: check the ways a player comes out on top before checking the ways they die.