well, that escalated really quickly! I managed to beat the first level after it got to the "hard mode" but boi does death make the game hard too quickly. Since players are not used to games becoming more hard the more you lose I would slowly introduce more and more difficult into the game rather than "Oh, you died. Here's 5 cannons that make it almost impossible for you to move forward" thus allowing the player to recover since the levels, without the extra difficulty are challenging already. Maybe instead of more obstacle the ball could change in size making it more challenging without having to now learn something new about the level