I ended up doing a little rewrite!

Now, the rooms load / unload from the scene tree in a way that only the current room and its direct neighbors are loaded in the node tree. This allows us to make room transitions more efficient - instead of moving everything in the world to a static camera, we can now just move the camera from room to room! This means we don't have to pause physics when the player enters a new room.

#godot #gamedev