New name [?]
To date, I have thrown out and rewritten the design doc and story seven times. This latest revision has lasted longer than the others, so I'm hopeful that it's the last.
"MK-ZEBRA" was originally a reference to MKUltra. The story started out in the vein of paranoia fiction, but now it's drifted toward something hopefully a little less cliche. The current working title is "The Yearning". Let me know if you hate it. I have not yet encountered any major concerns with the new title.
New humanoid model
I modeled, rigged, and animated a new placeholder humanoid model. It'll do for now.
Beneath a certain health threshold, the helmet opens to expose the head. It's not too visually distinctive. It'll probably get redesigned.
I'm using this to experiment with a "last-hitting" mechanic, as in a MOBA. You can't headshot an enemy until one of your ally units damages it.
Parkour
A while back I realized that I'm not quite done exploring the parkour mechanics in Lemma. There will be some parkour elements.
I'm taking the best bits from Lemma, refining them even more, and cutting out the garbage. With the new codebase, it's actually possible to build up momentum above the max speed, whereas Lemma killed your extra momentum whenever possible.
Here's the slide move filling in some transient yellow floor tiles:
Turrets, projectiles, particles
Things shoot each other. Lights flash. Sparks fly.
The red areas visualize the view range of enemy units. I hijacked the deferred point light renderer to overwrite the albedo color for those areas, rather than modifying the lighting buffer.
Also, film grain is gone.
Soren
This is a work-in-progress character. She's an AI who thinks she's a person, currently voiced by a text-to-speech program. The diamond frame grows and shrinks to match her voice.
Here's my amateur pixel art for her spritesheet:
Open source
The entire repo is now up on GitHub (URL will likely change soon due to name change). I'm retaining copyright on the assets, but they're available for download, and all the code is MIT licensed.