I hade an issue when the screen went yellow (see screenshot) at about 1.5 minutes remaining and the player character just slid all the way to the starting point without letting me control it at all for a good 30 seconds. Just letting you know. Cool game. I think you can do something interesting with this with powerups inbetween rounds and other fire type creatures or hazards. LOTS of options with this cool idea.
It looks like you may have highlighted the game and maybe clicked outside the play area, which would explain the controls not working. You can try again in full screen so that cannot happen. Thank you for the suggestions and thank you for playing!
Thanks for the freeback and regarding the yellow screen, you most likely highlighted or clicked several times at the end of screen game. This also happened to me with many games I played and to fix it, you just need to click on the Random places on the game page, but not on the game screen itself.
