We are very happy about the feedback we got for our entry, you can try the original version here:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/fell-out

One of the things we got a lot of is how close the camera is. The reason for this was optimization!

After creating some tooling we were able to push a lot more sprites (they are meshes now) into the view and still get 3-4x performance:

And here is before:

Those meshes (which are created from sprites in an atlas) are then divided into cells and each cell is combined into a single mesh. This drastically reduced the DrawCalls (3k to 60). Unity's Dynamic batching and SRP batching was performing 2x worse.

There is a few more topics I want to share about how we are preparing for expanding the game to the full scale, wondering what is a good way to do this