itch.io

I am glad that you found my feedback useful. I think you're an excellent developer, and I think the core digging mechanic you have in this game is fun. You seem like you have good design instincts, both for game systems and art + UI, but it's hard for me to tell how much experience someone has sometimes. I have written some advice below that is related to balancing games as a solo developer (not related to this game specifically), in case you're in a place that you might find it useful as well. You might have considered all this already or have your own strategies that work out, if you have just ignore this of course, it's just my perspective on an approach that I find works for me.

Balance is one of the most difficult parts of game development to get right, I think largely because of how time consuming it can be to test things and make iterative improvements, and because of the huge number of different ways you can approach a balance problem. Not to mention that many different approaches to a game can exist, the more complex the systems are. Even games with massive budgets and teams of playtesters and developers (almost all games really) have balance problems on release (sometimes massive glaring ones). Never feel bad about your game having a balance issue you missed, when teams of veterans can't do it either.

I think a valuable thing to do for a solo dev, is to periodically playtest your game from start to finish. Maybe you already are, but I think most solo developers very understandably struggle to find the time for that, and limit their testing to just ensuring that game mechanics work, skipping through gameplay segments with modified saves or resource costs to do targeted feature testing.

Doing a full run of your game periodically helps you spot balance issues and can provide some insight into how to approach them. It gives you a feel of how valuable certain items are over others, where resource crunches can occur, if any upgrades are overpriced or undervalued, if some things are unlocked too soon or too late, things you'd miss when only testing things in isolation. 

For some games, depending on the design, it can be harder for a solo developer to test if there's a lot of variables but a "best strategy" that has good balance (but other approaches with poor balance), because it is difficult to pretend to ignore that the "best strategy" path exists for example. For this reason, and because outside feedback is important in general, I think it's be good to ask a few friends and colleagues if they'd be willing to act as game testers every once in a while. It's good to get fresh eyes untainted by playing previous versions as well, so I think it's good to make a mental note of "scheduling" some of your testers to only test later versions. (so that a beta release playtester isn't "tainted" by experience and knowledge from playing the alpha release)

(don't feel pressured to reply to this promptly, or to spend too much time on a reply)