DECOMM mod for Half-Life 2: Episode Two

Story/Concept so far.
Overwatch Transhuman Arm UNIT Holo-8 has survived a fatal helicopter crash in the Quarantine Zone of City 12. His body was severely damaged, including his implants. Barely alive, he crawls out of the helicopter's remains, used remains of a Medical Emergency Kit and proceeded to the nearest exit from the Quarantine Zone.
And that's it. I've never really worked on the story, but the concepts were changed several times before the mod became live. The very first concept was that you play as a metrocop doing ordinary tasks and raiding some rebel hideouts. Pretty simple up until you are tasked with guarding a cargo train, where you get jumped on by rebels who jam your comms and after a quite prolonged fight, you address the issue of the train being hijacked. So, you jump on top of it and it derails and crashes in the Quarantine Zone. I've decided to scrap the metrocop part due to the lack of assets. The second concept was that you're a rebel guy tasked with restoring long-range communication betwen the resistance outposts. And the relay tower that required a fix was located in the Quarantine Zone. I scrapped that idea for now, but I'm sure I will reuse something from that. You see, I really like the Quarantine zone thing with all that xen stuff and etc. This really complements the xen fauna you meet in the original Half-Life series. This will enable me to add some extraordinary character encounters.
In both of these concepts you play as the opposite sides. So, I've decided to connect them into one thing and this mod is the result. The idea is that depending on your playthrough you will get different outcomes in the story. Are you an a obedient machine, built for termination, or a living thinking human capable of remorse?

Features so far.
Overhauled sound effects (the easiest part, but not professional).
Updated metropolice models and textures. (so far, edited the armband and removed C17 and some minor changes)
Updated/redesigned resistance. (they will now differ in clothes and armors.)
Updated combine models and textures.
Overhauled material files (added normal maps to every single world texture so far).

Planned features so far:
Reanimated/enhanced character animations. Also feature death animations and flinches. I plan to port these from Half Life: Alyx and Left 4 Dead.
More enemy types, like armored metropolice, ported combine from HL:Alyx and etc.
Enhanced rebel/combine AI.
More action-survival things like scarce resources and no quicksaves/manual saves. You can only save through dedicated save stations or autosave.
Enhanced gunplay. Greatly reduced TTK and etc.
Enhanced effects, like dynamic lights for muzzleflashes, bullet impacts, grenades and etc.
No melee weapon, just add a bash/kick action. (Subject to change)

Level design progress:
Absolutely zero besides from some dev rooms.

In conclusion, I plan a lot of changes from the standart Half-Life gameplay, however I am a solo developer, and this is a hobby project, which I actually want to use as a groundstone for learning code/gamedesign better.