The progress report is here!
The combat system is at a "barely playable" state. It's still (far) less polished than I'd like it to be, but at least it works, so I'll put it on the backburner and work on other stuff for now.
In the past two weeks I've been mostly studying the new animation system of Houdini 20. I think it's quite suitable for the non-trivial rigging and skinning workflow needed for this game. In the long-term it might save me some time compared to Blender's animation system, but it takes quite a lot of effort to set up...
So, no much progress in this report. Hopefully I'll have some new animation to show in next 2 weeks tho!