Smooth Transition from Topdown to Platformer

It would be nice if it was scrollable, as the planet could be more of a realistic size with more space for exploration, but since this is on the same layout as the rest of the solar system that may pose problems. I'm still kind of thinking through everything.

Perhaps rather than moving the player, I move the terrain under the player? Then I only have to keep one block on the screen for the terrain and distort that according to the noise at the player's current "position".

Well if you were to set the columns to 360, you could set the width of the layout to 3600, or 36000 even just to make things simple.

There's really no need to worry about the vram if you tile a texture, but your planet texture really wont tile well to platform visually.

In that case you would probably want to generate overlaying textures for different levels of noise IE more distortmaps.