I'm glad you enjoyed the bizarre movement! Fun story, the quick respawns are actually a bug that turned into a feature. The original plan was to have a longer ragdoll duration, but I enjoyed testing the game so much with the short timers that I forgot to lengthen them again. By the time I figured out they were still short, I realized the game played much better that way anyway.
As for the world, I honestly just used a map wholesale from the Unreal Marketplace. The goal was indeed to add more ways to interact with the world and places to visit, maybe modify the map a bit so it's not 100% a ripoff, but I had to keep the scope small to start. So there's a whole town there, most of which is not used... yet.