I played through the entire game as a monk, because I can’t deny that I’m a typical gamer and I like the mage class. I’d like to point out that, regardless of whether you, as the developer, wanted to hone your graphic design or coding skills, the graphics are far superior to the gameplay itself. The gameplay is very generic and doesn’t introduce anything interesting—but on the other hand, by creating a title like this, you’re definitely tapping into a significant niche of people who enjoy this kind of thing; figuring out which upgrade makes more sense and memorizing the attack cycles of specific mobs becomes quite addictive at some point.
If you want to expand your audience, I’d suggest introducing various more interactive elements—just clicking the spacebar might not be enough; or maybe it is? Maybe some zone buttons will need to be clicked a few times? Or there could be ones that highlight but in a different color, making them unclickable. Or ones that move along the bar faster than our “cursor” indicating where we are? I don’t know, but that sounds like a pretty interesting twist to the game that would introduce more interactivity and would definitely be an interesting solution.
So far, the only way to scale up during gameplay is by leveling up and selecting perks after defeating an opponent—(which is why constantly picking opponents is ultimately too OP, and it’s not worth it at all to go for the coin tiles). You can also buy upgrades in the shop at the very end, but that’s not enough. Maybe, for focusing on coins in the mage’s path to make sense, they would have had to add some scaling armor or weapons—it definitely didn’t make sense to introduce this in the first two zones (maybe in the second one), but in later stages, once the player understands the basics, it could be an interesting solution; This would also make it worthwhile for the player to visit shops earlier than right at the very end—either to look for the best weapons or simply to upgrade their character.
I hope what I’ve written makes some sense to you. To sum up, it’s a really cool game.
Good luck!