Kodu Game Lab

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?

I was 25 when I finally found something that enabled me to get my thoughts out onto a computer screen. I’m not, by any means, a natural programmer. I doodle, I make noise and have produced people who make noises, a blank IDE is a truly terrifying thing to me still. When I was a kid, I’d fiddle around with The Quill, I’d tootle about with GAC, Shoot-em-up Construction Kit, heck – I even bought The HURG (if you don’t know, don’t ask, you don’t want to know). I’d taken a look at 80′s BASIC variants and lordy, I tried, but to someone who’s happier with a pencil and a piece of paper, it’s work. I didn’t even bother trying to wrap my head around any sort of Z80 assembler, that’d be a total non starter. What I did want to do though, readers, was stop these bloody creative urges from eating me away inside. The limitations of technology, they said “ur urrr”. When you’re struggling to fit a game into 48k, the chances of writing a game creator that’s going to throw up something decent is pretty slim to none. Or at least, it was until recent years with stuff like Jonathan Cauldwell’s tools.

What these crappy little packages did do though, was convince me to not give up that hope. Sure, I don’t have a brain that’s fit for coding but maybe one day, when technology catches up – something will come along and fit the bill. It did. Eventually.

Yet, these packages I mentioned above, you don’t really see that sort of stuff anymore. Most likely because people who can code are far too busy writing games or they’re too nerd to understand what a non coder brain actually wants from a package. And that’s sorta where Kodu steps in. It’s not about enabling someone to write the next Halo 3, it’s about capturing and fostering those creative urges and giving folks who can’t do the ability to just do.

It’s pretty fucking smart too. It doesn’t open for the first time user with a completely blank canvas, instead opening on “tutorial 1″ thus doing away with the initial “oh deary me, whatever am I supposed to do?”. A small map, an inanimate character and in the distance, a tower. A speech bubble pops up indicating that you need to program the character to move to the tower and asks whether you can do that. It’s ever so polite and a wonderful way of breaking down that horrific blank IDE syndrome. I’d be hard pressed to ask for a better introduction to something.

Win number one: No scary blank screen and flashing cursor.

None of this file browsing, load example game, trawl through what may as well be nonsense guff that proper coding entails for the first time user – straight into a slightly fantastical looking world and charging you with a task to complete.

As you’re finding your way round the controls to see what does what so that you can move the little fellow to the tower, you’re introduced to different aspects of what Kodu can do.

Win number 2. Teaching by experimentation.

Sure, you can be a regimented little so and so but where’s the fun in that? Let’s just nip off for a moment and make that ground into a hill, let’s see what happens if I punt a chap on a unicycle down here, let’s just change some colours around. It doesn’t need to beg you to experiment, Kodu just presents you with everything you need and lets you find your own way around if you so choose. You can never really underestimate how much folks can pick up from just dicking around with stuff, moving a few things around, changing numbers/colours whatever.

Thing is, it’d all be for naught if Kodu didn’t produce something that looked pretty darn smart and made it easy to produce something that looks pretty darn smart. Going back to the horrors of The HURG for a moment, you’d load up the example game and be presented with a pretty nifty (if shonky) platform game. Someone had obviously spent a fair bit of time making a really nice player sprite. However, what if you’re a kludgy goit when it comes to art? Well, you end up with something that looks like crap in a box and that’s pretty demoralising.

Win number 3: Kodu let’s you get results, good looking results quickly.

There’s little more encouraging than that, folks. Being able to see the fruits of your tinkering after a couple of button presses.

I spent a few hours earlier this afternoon doing pretty much nob all constructive with the thing. Mainly I spent my time raising and lowering ground, dropping actions onto the player to see what happened and then flooding the landscape with water just because I could and because the water looked so pretty glistening away as it does. Despite a bit of initial finding my way around the controls (of which, they’re lots) it felt pretty good. I’ll be going in for the big test at the weekend when I’ll be handing my copy of Kodu and a controller over to my kid to have some fun with. Why sit there just watching daddy type crap into a computer when you can bunk up on the sofa, controller in hand and just play about. I’m not expecting him to do anything especially of use, but knowing him as well as I do (I am Dad after all) I can pretty much guarantee that inbetween pointing at the tele and asking me to look at what he’s done, he’ll be kept quiet for hours with it. Heck, if Kodu manages half an hour, it’s more than earnt its money there.

So, it’s not just about the end product and that’s a fairly important thing to bear in mind when assessing Kodu. It’s about letting people cock around easily, get something up and running on a screen and to let them sit back and look chuffed with themselves. Everyone deserves to have that, y’know? That it can do so much more once you get the hang of it, well, that’s Captain Icing meeting Captain Cake and having a lovely old get together.

Which brings me back round to why the restrictions piss me off so much. 8 minutes isn’t enough time to get a taste of that. Not everyone is going to be like me and immediately punt over for it after having a little fiddle – quite possibly because despite its open and accessible presentation it’s still a what the fuck to any non-coding or game enthusiast parents. More so, as has been discussed many times about the Indie Games service, that small issue of visibility. Yeah, that one – the one that comes up so incredibly often that I feel like stapling my cock to a table rather than endure hearing about it again.

The potential for Kodu to be buried is stupidly high and it doesn’t deserve that. So, folks, readers, parents and chums – I’m going to end this piece with a bit of a request. Try Kodu. Heck, buy Kodu if you think any of what I’ve splurged above might be up yours or your kids street (whilst I’ve focused a tad on the kiddy friendly nature of it, I’ve had lots of fun with it so y’know, not just for kids) but more importantly, tell people about it.

Encouraging stuff like Kodu that does what it does so bloody well is a good thing.

It’s a good thing for creativity, it’s a good thing to encourage folks to believe that yes, they can make a game no matter how simple and no, they don’t need to know diddly squat about floating point numbers or vector maths or anything like that to do so. It’s good to encourage people to push this sort of thing ever further, let’s get more developers and publishers to understand there’s a market out there that doesn’t just want stuff like this, it needs it.

The more we can get folks unleashing their creative urges, the more varied and colourful a world we get and the less folks who sit there, like I did for 10 or so years, wishing there was an effective way of getting those bloody thoughts out of their head once and for all.

It’s 400 points. 400 measly points, readers. Let’s do this.

*or to make the trial period more flexible for the Indie Games service but I guess when you’re trying to force a price tag on everything this likely doesn’t seem the best idea to bean counter central.