This is really neat! I love caves and pixel art so this is right up my alley. The feature I would like to see is a mini map that fills in as you explore, so you can know you if you explored the whole cave.
thanks for the suggestion! I have toyed with that idea myself! there is code in place already that would make it easy to make a simplified map of each cave, so I'll explore a map mechanic when making this project into an actual game :D