I've been throwing the last handful of hours at trying to optimize the world shift mechanic - there are still a few hitches even after Batching, Instancing, using Chunks, and using Object Pooling... I think the only thing I could do to make it faster would be to maybe use multiple threads, or just generate a voxel mesh through code and only update affected chunks XD (wanted to avoid this because I always lose so much time winding triangles...).

If the issues persist after adding gameplay, then in the worst case I can just go back to flat images as the world, instead of 3D, I guess.

Either way, I need to actually get said gameplay into the game, doing the Jam anyway so have tonight and tomorrow to make it as fun as I can, then I can polish with whatever time remains :).