Lava and Spaceship Thrusters

I've been working on my platformer game a tiny bit. It has been bugging me how the lava works. It just ramps up in speed until it overtakes the player and they lose. Even if the player does everything right, the lava will eventually flow over them. I want the player to be able stay ahead of the lava wave if they are playing well. Now, the lava has a steady speed that moves slower than the player can run. However, the lava now has a maximum distance that it can get from the player so the threat of the lava catching up is always there if the player messes up a little bit. The problem with this is that the player doesn't have much of a bubble if they come upon a room where they are required to backtrack a little bit. To solve this problem, I made the lava move slightly slower when the player is facing to the left, so when the player has to go up zigzagging platforms or run backwards, they don't get punished so much for it.

I've also been working on a space themed game that I did as a concept a while back. I didn't do much work on it, but it was playable. Original, you controlled the player's "spaceship" with the accelerometers, but I didn't like those controls much, so I recently changed it to just thrust towards the locations of the player's touch. The game has some physics involved so you have to overcome the momentum in the direction you're already moving to change directions. The power of the thrust is directly related to the distance between the player's touch location and the spaceship. The more distance between the two points, the more power behind the thrust. I wanted to illustrate this in game, so I put a thruster flame that comes out of the ship and points in the opposite direction that the player is thrusting, as you would expect. To display to the player the power of the thrust, the flame changes size based on the thrust force.

Here are a couple pictures of the game. In the first picture, the touch point is close to the player and in the second picture the player's touch is farther away, so the flame is much bigger.