Rania: the platform game my daughter came up with

It all started with a sentence from my 9-year-old daughter: "I want a cute platform game, like Cat Dash." With one condition: the hero had to be Rania, our little dog. That's how Rania was born, a platform game for Android that I'm building with Godot, C# and Claude Code (Opus 5.5) as my copilot. The game is still in development: these are real screenshots of the current build.

The game

Rania runs on her own: tap the screen to jump, twice for a double jump. Collect bones and coins, fill the bowl with kibble and water, and reach the little dog house at the end of the level.

• 10 levels across 5 worlds: the castle forest, Pucón, the beach, autumn and the city rooftops at night, plus an endless run.
• No game over in the levels: after a fall, you go back to the last flag and set off again with a tap.
• What the dog loves: the tennis ball (super jump), the frisbee (gliding), the squeaky rubber chicken (all the cats run away), ice cream and the sprinkler (Super Pup mode).
• What the dog hates: bath time, the hair dryer, the vet cone, the robot vacuum, the lawn mower, the wasp and the storm cloud.
• Mischievous cats: a ninja, a yarn thrower, a skater, a sleeping giant, a cat on a branch dropping pine cones and the Cat King as final boss. Plus mice running away: catch them for coins.
• 8 characters: 3 dogs and 5 cats bought with coins, and accessories (bow, party hat, sunglasses, crown…) bought with bones.
• 4 languages: Spanish, English, French and German.

A world set in Pucón

We live in Pucón, Chile, so there had to be a world from here: the Villarrica volcano above the lake, monkey-puzzle trees, giant nalca leaves, copihue flowers, volcanic rock and steaming hot springs.

The tech stack

• Engine: Godot 4.7, .NET edition, with all the code in C#, the same language I use for my web projects.
• Android: "Compatibility" renderer so it runs on most phones, exported as a signed APK (arm64).
• Levels: written as text (ASCII chunks) that the game assembles; the endless run picks them by difficulty.
• Sound: effects and music synthesised in code, without a single audio file.
• Graphics: sheets of characters, items and scenery generated with AI (ChatGPT) from my prompts, cut out automatically with Python (Pillow, NumPy) and upscaled ×4 with Real-ESRGAN, locally. The art-direction mock-ups were made with Claude Design.
• Scenery: 4 parallax layers per world (background, hills, ground, foreground), with depth effects and shadows.

Claude Code (Opus 5.5) as copilot

Claude Code writes and edits the C# code, cuts out and integrates the images and, above all, tests: an autopilot plays all 10 levels headless after every change and reports where a section is impossible or too hard. That's how level 10 got fixed: its jumps were too long at that speed.

Designed for a 9-year-old

Big buttons, no text you can't do without, hitboxes smaller than the drawings (near misses are forgiven), no game over and constant rewards: combos, accessories, characters to unlock. And the names of the family's other dogs were changed in the game; only Rania keeps hers.

It's the same approach as WindRush, my windsurf and kitesurf game: Godot, C# and AI as a copilot. It's also a good example of when a native app makes sense, as I explain in mobile app or web app?. For your own projects, see my custom software development service.