Well, what killed that feature was more like, poor prioritization. The code for using skills is in the game, but not the skills themselves, because I instead spent that time making a bunch of other things... which all got cut last minute to make the version of the game that got released instead. Still in the game's code, just unused and inaccessible. Like the half-finished world map and half-finished towns with NPCs and stuff, now reduced to a fancy title screen decoration, ahaha
If I hadn't started 10 days late and knew the direction I wanted to take the game from the start I totally coulda done it, but hey, that's game jams baybee!! Aside from a few things like that, I'm mostly satisfied with the form it ended up taking anyway