I LOVED that animation right at the start. awesome stuff.
I've been building 3D platformers for a *long* time so I hope you don't mind some unsolicited feedback! Honestly for the fairly short jam turnaround you built a *ton* of content and should be super proud of what you did!
- The player's acceleration curves feel pretty off - which seems to be a common point of feedback. I'd suggest playing various games in the genre you view as inspiration, taking recordings, and literally noting how many frames / milliseconds on average it takes the character to go from a stop to their max base speed, and then upon releasing the stick how long it takes that same character to go from max base speed to a stop. You'll find it tends to be snappier on both ends, though with a good bit of variety depending on the game. By designing your character locomotion in a way that exposes those acceleration and friction numbers you can experiment a ton by tuning those knobs until just moving your character around feels good, and you can proceed from there.
- Bonus points if you tweak the target base speed up or down depending on whether the player is going uphill or downhill based on the normal of the ground they're standing on - helps make the character feel like they're actually reacting to their environment.
- You've gone for the choice of making the character's facing direction lock-in upon jumping. This is a pretty big schism in the world of 3D platformers - with plenty of great games on both sides of the fence. What I will say is that games that do what DELLA does (locking the direction on a jump) tend to offer options to correct or redirect jumps at least a bit. SM64 kick, Sunshine hover nozzle, etc. They also make sure to preserve your forward speed into the jump, and I'd swear there'd be times in DELLA where I tried to drift a bit sideways and would actually *lose* forward momentum for having done so. The player's forward-backward and side-to-side aerial speed should basically be entirely separated in this case, with tunable values for how much the player can add or subtract to their forward-backward airborne speed (0 would mean like, castlevania-level committal jumps), and separately how much side-to-side drift you give them. You should also take a look at the games which allow the player to rotate in midair - this case is actually generally easier to implement (grounded and airborne cases are handled basically the same under the hood) and plenty of great games with complex movement do it too. Lots to explore here!
- I'd want that Dash move to more instantly snap me up to a fixed "run speed" - I can appreciate the acceleration but from a dead stop it felt tough to really get into a flow. Maybe rather than a smooth acceleration simply having a base dash speed and then, if the player sustained it for X seconds, they reach a Gear 2 Dash speed? You could also do different particles / sounds / animation poses for each stage, and it could all read a bit more cleanly.
- In general if I could give any feedback I'd say most actions in the game felt like they could be *snappier*. The player claw attack felt very tame (like a light 'nyeh' rather than a real scratch), when I hit a rotating wheel it rotates super gently and the door / platform moves slowly to its destination. All of this should be faster, more exaggerated - it'll read much better and keep the player in the flow.
- You did great on the ledge grabbing. That's not a trivial thing and you totally nailed it. No notes.
But yeah!! 3D platformers are *so* hard and you have a really impressive showing for only a month - I hope you're able to take what you've done for this jam and build more cool stuff!