Pretty much the gold is there as a high score mechanic. If I had more time I would have included a tracker of your max level reached/max gold. I'm glad that you found the game balanced, I tried to come up with enemy strength and armor values that would put the player in danger, but not be too much. So long as you are able to find one or two pieces of armor in a level, you should survive most encounters and the way the maze is built, the "boss" is guaranteed to be far away from the player at the beginning.