Day 22:
Successfully integrated the item system into combat! I had the skeleton combat loop from the early weeks of the project, and I now revamped the UI, with selectable menus for attacking and using items. Thankfully I had done the work for displaying inventory items and having the selected item featured - the UI here is very much similar to the UI in the player stat/inventory screen. Some modifications are just what text fields need to be updated, and I got around that by having an enumeration for what screen the code is currently in - if in the inventory screen, the code would display certain text, and in the combat screen other text would be displayed. Somewhat hacky but allows me to reuse a lot of the code!
There is still a little bit more to do with the combat: ending the combat with winning/losing, and being able to gain experience and items/gold to loot. Currently I have an escape button (Return to Overworld) to switch scenes, but next up is having that occur naturally in-game!