Thank you for your kind remarks and for your suggestions. :)
You might be interested to know that the foley effect for the collecting was the sound of a set of keys being jingled that was programmatically sped up.
While the background, I agree, is a bit unsightly, there is a secret to it, too.
I wrote a script that, every frame, randomly generates a tileMap behind the playerCharacter when the character moves. The Map moves to catch up to them, though at that point, it likely looks different, which makes it hard to notice it even moved. This and the camera lag work together to hopefully communicate that the player is moving. This allows for a map that is as "large" as the GoDot cordnight system allows (some random Reddit post claims ±2.147 × 109 by ±4.5 × 1012 based on the Vectors used to store cordnites).
It is all a bit silly, of course, perhaps only being there to represent how, all the time, we will be unable to play dead game stretches on and on.
Bubbles would have been nice. I actually considered a bubble system, allase, circles are difficult and I was eager to start on the next thing.