This is a nice and simple game. It’s a pleasant change of pace to just dig walls for a while. I think you could lean into that. Let players sculpt shapes to their liking, sell them little boards to close up tunnels and markers to slap on walls to find their way. Have deeper areas or lower levels with a visual change, richer ore and tougher minigames… etc.
But it’s too much of a grind currently, and the upgrades I reached weren’t very dramatic. It would feel better if you were bringing back twice as much cash with an upgrade you could buy after bringing back a single full load of ore. But since you have to go further to find ore, it actually feels like your payout per minute is dropping… if you were trying to build a narrative around gold rush futility or something, that could be clever, but if you just want a casual “turn off your brain and have fun peacefully digging out walls and making numbers go up” game, definitely not.
The timing minigame also gets dull quickly. You’d need some other dimension to that if you wanted to make this game longer.
I also noticed the awkward delay on movement and realized you don’t actually move until you release the key, rather than when you press it down, which is very unusual.