Painting the Black by Abraxas Interactive
For LD41, it's an abstracted baseball + breakout mash-up. Score points by getting players back to the home plate, hitting the fence puts a player on base, hitting the red "gloves" (break-out like boxes) kills everyone on base. Up and down to position your player, left and right to angle the bat, spacebar to swing.

| Windows | https://abraxasinteractive.itch.io/painting-the-black |
| Windows | https://abraxasinteractive.itch.io/painting-the-black |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/painting-the-black |
Ratings
| Overall | 401th | 3.3⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 482th | 3.042⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 238th | 3.58⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 345th | 3.6⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 206th | 3.58⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 520th | 2.023⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 498th | 2.729⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 32🗳️ | 17🗨️ |
Keep coding :)
Congratulations!
- Not sure if you're aware; I think itch.io set your downloads to ask for a $2 payment. You can skip past it, but I don't know if you want that there.
- You have a post-LD version, but there's no description of what changes you made. If it's just bugfixes I'll tend to play a post-LD game, but I'll avoid it if there's new features for the sake of fair ratings.
The game itself is a really good idea, and it has a fair bit of graphical and controls polish. It is fiendishly difficult, and maybe a bit too punishing. My highest score at time of writing is 3, but most games ended with 0, because I have to hit 4 balls in a row perfectly just to score. In terms of controls, I think I know what you were trying to emulate with mapping hit to release spacebar. I would have preferred something like LMB or Z because my spacebar isn't particularly responsive on the release, but that's a personal gripe. A bigger concern is that there seems to be no way to invert the left-right controls, and my brain is convinced you have them backwards.
I might come back to this and try to get a higher score.
Anonymous - I changed it on ITCH.IO so that it doesn't allow for donations. The post-jam version adds music and sound effects and makes some changes to gameplay. There is a block of text above the download links that outlines some of the changes - but yeah definitely play the JAM version for voting purposes.
In the next update I'll make it so you can invert and re-map the controls!
I think the "red gloves" need to be a bit smarter though, especially once you start getting some points. I found that the best strategy was to aim at a corner and barely ever change the angle. Even occasionally hitting one wasn't that much of a setback; filling the bases again is tedious, but getting a strike is a much worse penalty.
I took a quick look at the post-jam version btw, and the addition of sound/music definitely helped a lot.