Totally new and losing my mind

I’m attempting to learn Unity and feel like I’m bashing my head off a brick wall.

I’m wanting to make an old school platformer to learn the ropes. I want to get the character controller fixed first as I don’t want to start designing levels until the movement is set like I want it. I need the character controller to do a number of things.

It needs to have variable height based on the length of time the jump key is pressed.
It needs to have a normal walk speed and also a button pressed to allow running, the longer a run, the faster the player goes.
Player also should have momentum, so when a direction change happens during running player doesn’t instantly switch direction.

Basically, it’s Mario’s movement as seen in Super Mario World on the SNES.

If anyone can help me with this I would be insanely overjoyed. I’ve been beating my head on a wall trying to find this stuff for a couple of days now.

I tried using Prime31’s controller from Github, but couldn’t work out how to even get it running, or what I would need to edit to get it to work as I need it.

You can look at the official Unity Channel on youtube, you will fin a lot of beginers tutorial that migth help you a lot.

Also regarding your question, check out this video about character controllers for a platform game.

Hope its usefull.

As @CalaveraX suggests the tutorials are good place to start and learn more about Unity. Learn game development w/ Unity | Courses & tutorials in game design, VR, AR, & Real-time 3D | Unity Learn and the live session are really useful too.

This should help you build your mario styled game
http://walkerboystudio.com/html/unity_training___free__.html#unity3game3

Its’ useful to pose one question too, rather than a list. Determining the height of mario when a key pressed would be a case of timing the keypress/keyrelease and adding force based on the time pressed.

Thanks for the replies guys. AM working through the tutorials but as I’m a total beginner at this I’m having difficulty taking in the massive amount of stuff I need to learn in C#. Will keep plugging away and hopefully have something to show it for soon.