This game is awesome! I just wanted to play it quick and rate it, but I ended up playing through all of it! Great work!

Very nice! If it moves a little faster it would be even better.

Very cool, love the style. I could see playing this on a tablet for quite a while.

Really nice! The mechanic flows naturally from the elements involved, and ends up being challenging but relaxing, very in the spirit of the theme. BTW -- I fixed the Linux build of my game if you want to try it. :)

A

Great entry, a little slow but not really a problem.

I almost didn't want to solve it. I was having such a nice time making pretty patterns in the sand. Great job!

Fantastic visuals, the lines in the sand look impressive!

Beautiful game! I like how its tranquility encourages the player to sit back and think about a path before drawing it. At least that's what I experienced.

What a uniquely excellent game... level 8 in 45 moves! :p

Beautiful

Nice idea, very fitting and relaxing =)

Very soothing game. Superbly done!

As others have said, it would be great on a tablet or something. You should definitely continue to develop this prototype into a bigger game. Think about how the gameplay could be expanded a bit.

Very well done!

Absolutely gorgeous. Amazing what can be done with an extra 24 hours & a collaborator or two!

I updated my project page with a hint for RED. Cheers.

This is one of the best looking entries I've seen.

Great game! The idea is perfect and the graphics are one of the best i've seen!

Awesome job!

Great game, loved the music and the concept.

Really well polished graphics, love the effect of the lines on the sand.

Awesome job!

Beautiful, relaxing game. The difficulty curve was manageable but challenging. Some of the best art I've seen thus far, and the music fit the mood perfectly.

Original and hard. It's nice to play this game for a while and just relax, very smooth.

Very calming entry! It fits the theme in many different levels!

All I wanted was a "undo" button, that allowed me to cancel my last move.

Also a "sandbox" (heh) mode, where I can place stones at will and play with the rack would be welcome :-D

Thanks for the game!

Brilliant game! Unique and very challenging. Fits 100% the theme and still unbelievable good! Good job!

Great game! But becomes a bit boring after a while.

Wow, that was a great game. Looks really good, and I'm super excited that you guys are going to be releasing it on the Andriod. Good Luck :D

pretty interesting -- like the style -- got a good thing there -- great job!

Great progression! Without a tutorial, the design communicates the techniques to move the rake most efficiently but leaves room for players to experiment on their own.

Sand patterns are wonderful. Very zen and poetic game.

- SEPHY (@sephyka)

Great game! Love the art and the mechanics! Challenging and fun

Cool entry, nice level design, though I think the music is too energetic. I liked drawing on the sand!

Rotating the rake and watching the zen garden unfold between the rocks focused me.

Very novel concept, so graphics, i a zen atmosphere. Very nice !

Awesome!

I liked the graphics and the idea. Pretty slow movement though.

5/5 mood. Very relaxing, great concept, gorgeous.

Although, the collision box frustrated me sometimes as I wasn't sure if I collided or not. Also, I was stuck for countless movements sometimes when some unfortunate collisions occured, so I think the scoring system isn't really fit.

Polish thingies tho. :)

Good idea and nice sand effect. Maybe a bit to slow.

Genius! The mechanic is really innovative, good job!

Awesome graphics :D

Very impressive! Fits perfectly with the theme both in terms of mechanics and presentation. The sand effect is extremely satisfying. How did you achieve that?

This belongs on mobile/tablets!

@namuol: It *is* coming to mobile/tablets! http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2013/05/06/aranami-is-going-mobile/

The sand is basically a bump map, done in software JavaScript (CoffeScript). A height map indicates the level of the sand at that point, 0-255 with 128 being the initial value. We can easily draw arbitrary things into the height map, because it's just a regular (albeit invisible) canvas element.

To show the rake's trail, we draw a series of "dent" sprites, which are small circles that are black in the centre (the trough), white around the outside (the little wall around the trough, where the sand was pushed out), and then fade out to transparency (so the wall slopes gently outwards). To prevent dents overwriting each other, each dent is actually a semicircle, rotated so the round side faces the direction of movement of the rake.

We then calculate the lightness of a pixel based on the dot product of the normal with the light vector, as in regular Phong shading.

To this we add some random noise based on the normal and the pixel's location, which means that every small change in the height map results in some noisy change to the colour. This gives the impression of grains of sand rolling around.

All this would have been much easier and faster in GLSL shaders, but as we started out with 2d canvas, it had to be all software rendering. Which, in spite of several optimizations, is why it's still a bit slow on Firefox.

Source code for the sand, among other things: https://github.com/ttencate/aranami/blob/master/100-model.coffee (warning, LD-quality code, horrible hacks, etc. etc.)

A great idea that fits the theme very well. I like the calming effect of the game.

I had a feeling you were calculating the lighting in real time, but didn't expect you to do it with software; bravo!

I'm no stranger to needless software rendering: http://namuol.github.io/earf-html5/

;)