Glad to hear the majority has been solved! And yeah, I tend to overexplain myself since im passionate with gamedev too haha!
I can imagine you can patch the jump so you get vertical velocity by holding down until a set deltatime. That should allow you to not redo all the code, but itll need some value tweaking so the player doesnt shoot upwards like a rocket.... no idea if something like that would be possible, my only code knowledge is with Unity, there should be some Godot sidescroller guide with such info for sure.
Cool! That sounds about right for the antialiasing. Personally glad you will be taking a more lighthearted approach lmao, so fair enough!
I did see there was an invincibility state, is just that it felt like it was from [EnemyInstance] to [Player]. So, if theres a second enemy nearby, it would not be stunned. I'd have to check for myself again though, cannot say for sure. Nice it's there!
Using plants as platforming sounds really cool! Excited to see how that will affect the level design. I'd recommend tweaking the camera so it doesn't zoom in right after getting grabbed then, so we dont have it zoom in and out constantly, could be disorienting.
Yeah I saw your concerns with struggle systems and pacing, which I do agree that it can be incredibly annoying to deal with whenever you are not getting grabbed on purpose... is just, as you said, some enemies with ranged attacks might need it more so they don't become insufferable. Echidna Wars DX took that kind of approach, very similar to what you have for now, only very specific enemies have a struggle mechanic and instead uses a magic/stamina bar (you use it to either do powerful attacks or avoid damage from the first 1-3 grabs).
If the camera showing too much of the scene becomes troublesome, I'd suggest creating some camera boundaries, just so you don't have to deal with the camera showing potentially out of bounds. You know, stopping the camera from moving to the right when you reach said side of the room. Though if you wan't to create secret rooms for the player to find, it might cause more problems than the intended... something to mess around with I guess!
Yeah modding can be a bitch and a half, and most of it comes from having very grounded devtools to ease the process. Don't blame you at all if you prefer to not deal with all that garbage, I wasn't even able to find a straightforward enough answer when I looked at it myself lol.