Thank you for playing!
I'm really glad that you liked the style, but it's partly a byproduct of PICO-8's forced limited colour palette (you only have a maximum of 16 colours). Lines getting closer means that the people are moving towards each other (so you can tell what's going on by the position of the people over the lines).
I do plan on making changes after the jam ends and I did want to put more visual indicators (I used SFX to compensate!)