The voting round isn’t even over yet, but the responses to our zen garden raking puzzle game Aranami are so positive that we’ve decided to make it into a proper game for iOS and Android!

After having weighed the pros and cons of various technologies, we’ve started writing Lua code in the cocos2d-x framework. We considered libgdx but found a $299 Xamarin license (needed to run the Java code on iOS) a bit steep. We also considered Haxe with NME but it seemed a little immature, and lacking good documentation. We also considered playN, but it did not appear to have any advantage over libgdx. So cocos2d-x it is.

Improvements we plan to make, compared to the Ludum Dare version:

• More levels! We’re aiming for 30, instead of only 8.
  We might offer additional level packs as in-app purchases later.
• Super-crisp, beautiful, HD, Retina-ready graphics.
• Different rake shapes, starting with a straight I, going to the L from the LD versoin, then later on maybe U, T or Z shapes.
• Correct par scores. We had some trouble with beta-testers achieving better scores than we had, so we intend to brute-force all possible routes to verify there is no shorter option. It’s a large state space, so I’m not sure how well this will work, and we might have to use some simplifications, heuristics or hinting. Apart from producing a par score, such an algorithm could also tell us how many possible routes there are, which is a metric for how difficult the level is.
• An undo option.
• A sandbox mode, where you can draw lovely patterns to your heart’s delight.
• A level editor.
  In a future version, we hope to make levels shareable online.

Cocos2d-x is a bit harder to get started with than plain HTML5 and JavaScript, neither of us are familiar with the API and neither of us have a lot of Lua experience. But after a day or two of research, fiddling and hacking we’re finally over those first hurdles: we have a rake, and it moves in response to touch, both on Android and on iOS.

So if you haven’t played Aranami yet, go try it now! Any additional suggestions for the upcoming mobile version would be hugely appreciated; you can leave them in the comments to this post, or on the entry page!