So, it’s here then. The much trumpeted Kodu finally lands on the Indie Games service. Microsoft Research Team’s “easy” game creator, put together in XNA, released on the XNA dev service and rather awkwardly, subject to the same limitations that everything else on the service is subject to. So, that’s an 8 minute trial of a games creation package then. If I’m not much mistaken, for the average person that’ll be time enough to load up the tutorial, gawp at it with a slightly puzzled look on their faces then shrug their shoulders to go off and find the next massage application.
It’s a bit of a weird situation all told. On one hand, it’s nice to see that Microsoft employee’s don’t get any sort of special treatment, on the other hand it seems more than faintly ridiculous to not put this out on XBLA and offer a more flexible trial*. Of course, by more flexible I mean “actually giving folks enough time to dig into it and see what it does”. Being noble is one thing, but short of putting Kodu in a tiny box, locking said box and chucking the box to the bottom of the sea I can’t think of a faster way to sink this bloody thing. Actually, I can, but I’ll come to that in a moment, right now there’s other stuff to discuss.
Let’s get this out the way pretty early on. Kodu is a fucking brilliant and important piece of work. Yeah, I can already hear a couple of you developers griping or asking what the point of it is – but y’know, you guys and gals, you already develop. You’re already (hopefully) well versed in the art of vomiting out code from your brain and making your daft ideas come to life. It sorta goes without saying that it’s kinda not for you, y’know?
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