We wanted to start a building new 2D game ideas we have in mind, and we thought our favorite 3D platform so far (Unity3D) was not optimal enough to build a fully 2D game. And despite having experience with some other frameworks like LibGDX (as we built Exploding Bunnies ) along with some other Ludum Dare games, we wanted to see if there is something better.

After some investigation, we narrowed the list to Defold vs Phaser.io vs Game Maker, so we decided to give them a try by building a quick Pong demo in those 3 frameworks, and gather some conclusions before we start building our next 2D game.

Another year went by, and this is the third that we find ourselves writing a retrospective in the blog, not bad eh? 2016 hasn’t been too cheerful (at least not for fans of the many stars that have left us this year, or for people with progressive political views in general).

When it comes to Coconauts however it didn’t go too bad:

• Perhaps the biggest highlight of the year is the Retrophies project. Featured in HackerNews and Reddit. We started it as an experiment that turned out to be successful, and we are still expanding it (for instance, the latest addition was a multiplayer mario game using websockets).
• We’ve been experimenting with the ESP8266 chip, as a more versatile, powerful and cheaper alternative to Arduino, and we started migrating Watchduino to the ESP8266.
• A small hack that also turned out to be a hit is the Lightning-dodge-O-matic, featured on Hackaday!
• We published our custom mini-CI system
• We started the year working on a mobile version of Starcraft (which we shortly after stopped working on, but there’s still a demo video).

Our plans of focusing on game making haven’t materialized as much as we would have liked. We’ve also continued blogging very little during the year; although, there is one aspect where we have delivered: more frequent status updates about ongoing projects. Thanks to this, we’ve shown you some prototyes and smaller projects through the year despite not having any big reveals.

So what are our best whishes for 2017? Pretty much the same as the year before:

• More games
• More open source
• More frequent blogging
• More awesome

See you in 2017, have a good one! =)

Although the Nintendo Mini has been a great success, and the best way of recreating our childhood experience with a great collection of classic Nintendo games; There are a lot of things still Nintendo can do to our beloved classic games in order to let us play those classic games in a complete new (and refreshing) way. They don’t even need to do it on a new old mini console, but on their virtual store on WiiU or NX (switch)

Procedurally drawn fishies with balanced stats in our #procjam entry. Coming next: changing their shape accordingly! pic.twitter.com/dzoFheVaO1

— Coconauts (@coconauts) November 10, 2015

On 10 Nov 2015 we posted a procedurally generated game featuring websockets for the Procjam 2015 (done only in 2 days). Almost a year ago, we decided to create a post for it, just for the record (see the original post here)

Play the game here or check the Github repo

It’s been a while since we built and deprecated our Watchduino 2 smartwatch built with Arduino and BLE technology. The reason why we stopped developing the prototype was because it was not as optimal as we expected, and the bluetooth communication was unstable in practice; this is probably something we could have solved with time, but we just decided it was not worth it.

However, with the “new” ESP8266 we decided to try a quick prototype to see how it behaves as in a smartwatch, and we did a lot of things in just a couple of days, this are the list of features of our new ESPmartwatch: