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[Sensation]

My team's game, Beard, a 2D platformer, has one dedicated button for 'jump' and one dedicated button for 'use ability'.

The ability you have changes, but sometimes your ability may be an additional jump. When the ability is this additional jump, do you let the user press the Jump button an additional time to use the ability OR do you opt to make them press the dedicated ability button?

I personally side with flow, using the ability button for the ability seems most natural, but for the sake of respecting my teams judgement we're bringing this to further discussion.

Please enlighten us.

[Schoq]

any reason you can't do both?

[Sensation]

Do you know of any titles that do something similar to that?

It would be less challenging to perform the correct action, where intent and skill would be needed otherwise. It may easier to play, but is that more fun?

[ThemsAllTook]

I'd say so. The usual advice is to make your game as easy to control as humanly possible, rather than making the controls themselves an element of difficulty. If the jump button has no other purpose at the time you'd activate your ability, and your ability is an additional jump, I can't imagine any reason not to make the jump button use it. If it's meaningful to make the distinction between jump and action at the time you'd use the jump ability, then it might make sense to keep them separate.

[ProgramGamer]

Mario jumps off of Yoshi by pressing a different button than the jump button. Use the fiction of your game to justify using the ability button!

[Schoq]

more accurately, you jump off yoshi pressing a different jump button

[DXimenes]

Use the fiction of your game to justify using the ability button!

This is actually really really solid advice, put in a very condensed way.
You can make the visual/sfx/narrative feedback different enough from the regular jump to make it look like it's more closely related to an "ability" than to a "jump" and voilá, you can do as you please.

[Ariedhan]

My approach would be to try both versions of the control with a lot of people. You can decide for one or another control, but until someone outside the team and inside your target audience tries it you won't be 100% sure about what is the best way to do it.

Prepare some basic playable versions of the game, with the different controls and schedule some playtesting sessions. Inviting people to pizza usually works 

Hope that helps!

[baconman]

In Celeste, this is just an 8-way airdash, and it's the core mechanic of the game. So, there's THAT.

[saluk]

MMO's with their skill bars often have multiple very similar abilities on the bar which do essentially the same function that players learn to assign so they can double it up while one of the abilities cools down. Not saying this is brilliant design but it does happen.

Depending on your game, you could also justify modifying the core jump ability by having abilities either be passive or active skills. Active skills are activated with a button, passive skills affect your existing character (double jump; thick skin; ducking grants stealth, etc).

I don't think it terribly lacks cohesion to have some abilities (or even just this one) modify the control scheme. Implementation of this method may have a small code complexity cost.

[zombieonion]

You include two different control schemes in the options, and leave the guesswork to players.