Keep Inside by Wallbreaker5th
Limited Space, but you don't act as a player inside the space, but control the space itself.
You can manipulate the vertices of the polygon by dragging them, but the total area of the polygon will always remain constant. Your objective is to keep the ball inside the polygon.
Keep the ball farther from the border to get higher scores.


| Link | http://inside.wallbreaker5th.top/ |
| Link | https://github.com/Wallbreaker5th/keep-inside |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/keep-inside |
Ratings
| Overall | 142th | 3.667⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 197th | 3.421⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 13th | 4.421⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 20th | 4.421⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 284th | 3.053⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 163th | 3.265⭐ | 19🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 83th | 3.306⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 233th | 3.125⭐ | 18🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 17🗳️ | 11🗨️ |
Well done to implemented the limited space but it would more suite a ' you control the level and not the player '.
So in fact it is a very well made entry for multiple themes :)
I might get back to level 8 since that is where I struggle most!
After playing through it all I'm still not sure if I was more helped or hampered by the automatic selection of the nearest node. It was very difficult at times - especially when two nodes were pretty close together - to figure out in a blink of an eye which node will be moved, and quite often it wasn't the one I wanted and I failed the level. Though that probably is something I'd get more used to with time, as after a while it became a bit easier and the failures happened less often.
Bigger issue is that it is played on a canvas in a browser window with unrestricted mouse movement. For more precise control I dragged as far away from the node as possible, but that often meant my mouse cursor left the canvas while dragging. If I released the mouse button while it was away from the canvas, it acted unpredictably - i.e. it didn't detect the mouse-up event, and the node was still dragged. Best way to handle that would be to restrict mouse movement to the canvas using Pointer Lock API, but that would require at minimum drawing the cursor on the canvas yourself.
Without that, after about 30-40 attempts to complete the final level, I've worked around the issue by forcing the canvas into fullscreen mode, and that finally let me complete the game:

The idea is simple, but very effective. Thanks to the area of the polygon remaining constant as its shape changes, you get a lot of strategic choices, like whether it is better to drag the vertices directly on the way of the ball or to push the vertices in the back to move the entire polygon forward. And given the fact you've got to think quickly, you get a pretty hectic gameplay that gives a lot of satisfaction when you complete a level.
I really loved that the music changed based on the distance to the nearest point on the edge. Just the changing faces on the ball would be enough feedback, but the music getting more intense really built up the pressure.
Well rounded game, it is clever in particular that the ball has character. It could be a great teaching tool to help kids learn to hate geometry.