Thank you for playing the game and giving feedback. I do agree it definitely needs some fine tuning even though I'm happy with it overall. The acceleration/speed feeling slow is something I thought about myself as well, its a bit hard to make it feel faster without making the dive feel insignificant. That's really how you're supposed to build up speed, so I'm not quite sure yet how to find a better balance. The idea with the moment was to build up and maintain speed so making the normal walking speed faster would make it less needed / impactful. Not quite sure yet.
I fully agree on the walljumps, even I have trouble doing consecutive walljumps in some areas.
I kinda like the animation responsiveness, maybe an small automated transition, I think that's probably possible in godot. But I am switching animations via code so who knows, not majorly important imo. As long as the animations all read clearly the player will interpret their own transitions in their head.
As for the bouncy pads, I like em as they are now as in the beginning you can keep getting height but after 3 or so bounces you start losing it. I think I might increase the amount of bounces needed before it starts removing height or remove height less aggressively. But I think the bigger factor is that your jumps can very depending on how long you hold the jump button, which isn't clearly choreographed. In 2D mario games its really obvious because its easier to see from the side and the jumps are shorter, I tried to make an animation for it but couldn't come up with anything good that transitions nicely into the falling animation. If this is more clear I think the bouncy pad will feel a lot better as well.
I don't think a healthbar of any sorts is good for lava since then you can either move afterwords or it just takes longer to die and retry without being able to do anything like in 3D mario games with lava and no close by platforms. But a death animation would definitely be good, I remember one time during playtesting I was wondering for a second what killed me, that definitely shouldn't be happening.
Sry if the reply is a bit long, I thought either you or somebody else might find it interesting the thought process that go's into making decisions for this game. I appreciate the thought out feedback you gave me, thank you very much.
I'm thinking of making a bigger game out of this since I really like the movement, it only feels a bit slow and like its missing a few moves at the moment. I'll update this game once I get these and a few other things fixed