I quite like the idea. It gets very hard very fast. The only real issue I have with is the music, which sounds like a 2 second loop.

Sorry, MacOS user here...

Hi!
Nice game! I´ve found some sounds somewhat annoying, maybe put some variety to avoid this.

Watched the screen for a bit but the ball never even came close to my anti-matter...

Challenging game with nice visuals. Great first entry!

Great game! Awesome job!

I kindda wished I had a classic pong paddle to play it because you made it a little too challenging for my taste :p Nice game though!

Win screen pops up very unexpectedly, also the 'antimatter' tends to pass through the barrier randomly.

You mean you actually won!? I'm surprised, didn't think anybody would.

Very slow at the start, and after about a minute or two, I finally reflected the first orb enough to get another. From there, it grew at an insane speed, getting more than a dozen on the screen at once in almost no time at all (by comparison to the beginning).
On the whole though, it's a pretty fun game. The art is nice, it fits the theme, well done.

Quite like this, particular when it got to 4 balls. Felt a bit slow getting there but once it got tough it got a lot more fun

Pretty good. The curved shield layout is a nice twist on the general pong concept. I'd recommend making the controls based on sliding the mouse left and right rather than pressing the keys, and then using the mouse button to toggle the wall on and off.

Cool !

It took a bit to get started, but once it did and there was antimatter flying everywhere, it was pretty fun. I wouldn't mind being able to tear down my shield without having to be on the same spot as it, though.

Good game, and great Lua Programming! I love Lua, great language and nice! Good job!

Sometimes at the start, the ball will spawn in a way that causes it to never go near the shield, and the game just stalls. I was able to beat it, but it gets really hectic towards the end. I think the pacing is good, though at high speeds it's too hard to use the barrier effectively since most of the time there are more than one pieces of matter headed to a spot. The music loop is too short too, it gets really repetitive. It was fun though, especially near the end when there is so much going on.

Is it supposed to be ungodly fast?

Sorry, can't get it to work in Linux. Is the Linux-download right? I get regular exe with dlls. ;)

cute game!

Good game. Had fun with this one.
Felt a bit unfair when a ball landed "under" the shield or when balls collided near the antimatter and changed their direction towards the antimatter.
Got a nearly broken game at some point when the first ball went from one corner to the other and back and back...
Very good entry for your first time.

Worked in Wine anyways.

The music is perfect for this type of game, and I like it. Short perhaps, but it's a jam duh, and if you listen to Bubble Bobble and other arcade songs, they're not much longer. xD

The core game idea is cool. Like many other games here it's very slow first then super hectic. Still a great game.

Maybe if you make the pad go around in a circle it will be better? I don't like that the different pad states is differently sized. It makes it very hard to tell where to be, like playing with a bent club or tennis racket.

I think it could be a great game with some polish. Good Job!

Cool concept!

The difficulty increase too quickly in the end, and I quickly died :)

One way to compensate would have been to have to keep the up key to keep the barrier and removing the need to use the down key.

interesting pong game, nice effort

Sorry, for the Linux folks, there should be an actual .love file in the folder along with the exe's and stuff. Thanks for all the feedback folks! Many of the issues people are raising are ones I'm aware of, of course... time. I sincerely appreciate all the comments and criticisms.

Nice first LD entry, liked the old school arcade feel of this withe the simple addictive controls. Did have an issue with my screen resolution being set to small so the score and bottom shields were hidden.

Yeah, I'm not new to programming, but I would always just tool around as a hobby, see if could get certain mechanics working etc.. As I've never made anything somebody else used before, I gave no thought to handling different resolutions and stuff like that till it was too late.

Not bad at all.
Good base idea.

Cool twist on a breakout concept. I like the idea of the bat being on a curve, and being able to place walls was pretty clever too. Could do with a bit more audiovisual polish maybe, but certainly some good ideas here.