Kudos for Kodu?
January 27th, 2010
Well the simple answer is no.
Microsoft’s child friendly visual programming language has recently been made available for download on PC (it was originally released solely on the Xbox 360), or the ‘Technical Preview’ (read beta) has at any rate. So with that in mind, and being the curious creatures that we are, we decided to find out just how child-friendly Kodu was. What was the most scientifically accurate way to perform our research? By grabbing some beers and setting ourselves the challenge to see what we could build in one hour! We all know what we’re doing, we’d have a MMORPG up and running in forty-five minutes. Tops.
Microsoft famously got a 12 year-old girl up on stage at CES 2009 to demonstrate how simple Kodu was to get to grips with. However, it soon became painfully clear that young Sparrow Buerer already knew Kodu. She already had and grip. She had so much grip that you could probably lift her up with it and swing her around your head. Not that we endorse that sort of thing.
Forty-five minutes later our MMORPG hadn’t gone gold and wasn’t on its way to China for final production, then distribution. Forty-five minutes later:
- Tim had a very well built, but remarkably empty space invaders board.
Starfish enjoyed changing mat football.
- Jamie had the game equivalent to Waterworld (with similar critical acclaim).
- James had a mountain-scape with two portals, one of which killed you, the other… killed you.
- I had a flat, brown, desolate waste with a wheeled creature that swore at you when you shot him.
**** sums up my dismal effort...
He didn’t even really swear as Kodu has a nifty self censoring feature. Type three letters that may possibly become a naughty swear and Microsoft converts the entire word to asterisks. This even includes the word ‘kill’, which is strange as Kodu allows you to create games where you can shoot **** up.
It is a'technical preview' after all.
The whole process was slowed somewhat by frequent crashes and a lower than average framerate. That said, the game is optimised to run on an Xbox 360 rather than a workstation, and our quibbles are that of people fairly distant from the target market.
Still, I think we’ll stick to making our own games from scratch thanks.
