Thanks for replying, nice to hear from a fellow Seattleite.
Playtesters seemed to understand the melee intro and initial ammo grab with no problems, and seemed to really enjoy the combat encounters in general. People got really invested and in particular played the Common Room and the Courtyard in many different and surprising ways.
For navigation, a number of visual cues had to be changed or removed because testers found them confusing. For instance, it's established early that "rubble = impassable", but later I'd used a rubble mesh as a platform towards an exit, which confused testers.
Your guess is correct, the lobby loop back is to service one of the cut combat encounters. The issue of the courtyard gate is probably not clear due to unimplemented character dialog, which conveys that the area must be cleared before rescue can safely approach.
I'm not opposed to adding this additional content, just wanted to get an initial response from the community, and the current build seemed like a good stopping point for a v1.0. Thankfully the response so far has been pretty positive overall.
Thanks for the thoughtful and very useful feedback!
- S