I'm developing a 2D platformer with action-fighter elements. Currently things are working relatively smoothly but I'm having difficulty sorting something out. For the time, keeping my character's states and actions separated and preventing them from stepping on each others' toes is working out well and properly, but I would like to add a feature to my character to get him to behave a little bit more fluidly for the player.

At the moment, he has numerous attacks and abilities that he can execute, all of them being executed with button presses. Here lies the problem: Being as everything is executed through button presses, while an action is in progress I flag the game to disregard further button presses until the action has completed. Therefore, consecutive actions cannot be performed until after the previous action has completed entirely. In runtime this behavior feels very icky, and very ungamelike.

In games that rest most memorably at the forefront of my mind the player is able to execute button commands during the process of actions, and at the end of the current action, the following action is executed (seems like some sort of a queue system or something)

Can anybody offer any guidance with this?