Something that's been bothering me for quite some time is the slow loading times of the images on itch.io. Until now, I haven't had time to look into the technical side and performance of the game. However, now with the story complete, I've taken a look at how to optimize the game a little bit. In patch release version 0.6.1 (for itch.io only), I use the built-in HTML "preload" mechanism to load a chunk of images into memory at once, then in later passages, I will once again load a chunk into memory. You should see a massive performance improvement is most passages (image is being loaded instantly), however, on passages where the chunk-loading is being done, you will actually see a slight delay. I will keep an eye on this and fine-tune it as needed, but overall, this should make the itch.io version more playable.

For those interested in the technical details, this is the HTML way of preloading an image:

<link rel="preload" href="path/to/your_image_here.png" as="image">