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Split the day between revisiting a few older rooms to add a bit more variety around the border – the most conspicuous ones are the addition of a small pond and waterfall, and a revision of the old cabin, whose exterior has been redone to fit more seamlessly with the updated visuals – and setting up a system that generates a “liminal” border once the player reaches the ends of the map. It inherits the same properties as the generic forest cells, except when the player moves further in the direction of the border (for example, moving left when the player has reached a left-border liminal cell, or up or down), it will loop them back to another version of that cell. 

As long as they continue moving in any direction but the one directly opposite of the border (so, to use the previous example, any direction but right, which is back towards the main world region), they will continuously be looped into theoretically endless stretches of procedural forest. Only by turning back in the correct direction will the player be placed back into the normal world area, where they will be spawned in at a randomised location along the border, respective to the axis of movement.

It’s a neat concept that I think works well conceptually, although I’ll have to experiment with it a bit more in the future to see if it holds up in terms of consistency, both technically and visually. I’ve been facing a few performance issues lately with the rain splash particles (which I attempted unsuccessfully today to convert over to the built-in particle system) which has tuned me in to thinking about performance at large. So far, up until this point, it’s been a non-issue but just in case, I should make an effort to be more vigilant moving forward, especially when it concerns less visible kinds of performance decay such as slowdown caused by memory leaks.