Had around a week of downtime since last update. Not going to write that long since the gifs speak for themselves.
Enemy hit by projectile attack, downed corpse item recognized as grabable. Before corpse can despawn, it's grabbed and carried by the player, then thrown for a more powerful attack (would help if I can hit). Red line spawned from the enemy on the right is just a corpse item I hadn't set a sprite for. It despawns since it wasn't grabbed after a short amount of time.
Flutter move added. Since the character has wings, if he's not encumbered, he can flap around in midair (meant to save the player from awkward pits). There's no limit to the number of times he can do this, but it locks horizontal movement to a value scaling on level speed, so doing this indefinitely will kill the player from autoscrolling. As long as the player has an enemy in his grasp, the player cannot flutter. However, as soon as the enemy is thrown, he can resume.
Finally, HUD. Does HUD things. Track's the player's life (5 HP so far, but you can't see a breakdown since the only hazard is a pit that just does 10 damage) and resets on death. Basic things like that. Important thing is that I'm starting to actually design the character's face, and this lets me do something with the player moving offscreen to the left or above by placing some marker and death-timer (a la Smash Bros).
In other words, animations soon, but first I'd like to get inputs for combos at least roadmapped, add in some pause functionality, and menuing, in that order. I'd like to do something similar to fighting games where, after a brief moment from player input, the player is able to push some other button to modify an attack (i.e. pressing the Down key immediately after throwing will toss the enemy downward instead, or pressing guard after an unarmed attack will cause the player to spin their wings around in a damaging shield. Not those specifically, just the means to queue inputs).