Since it was first announced at the 2009 CES, I have eagerly awaited the release of Microsoft Research’s game creation tool/game, Kodu Game Lab. Having forked over the five dollar entry fee, I am stunned that this game doesn’t have more buzz around it. When I first watched the twelve-year-old Sparrow put together her own game at the Microsoft keynote I was skeptical, however, very interested. Now that I’ve created my own third-person single quest RPG, affectionately named The Golden Apple, I’m entirely convinced that Kodu is both as simple and fun to use as the original promises. Although my creation took quite a bit of time, about seven hours, the actual creation part is really as simple as creating your world via a detailed terrain editor, dropping in structures and characters, and then visually programming your game through icon clad radial menus.
Despite its ease of use and detailed settings customization options, I feel I was a bit misled regarding the game’s level of depth. In my anticipation I had dreamed of recreating my 8 and 16-bit favorites and had devised numerous fresh IPs, but because of a low asset budget represented by a thermometer combined with a very limited supply of programmable assets, Kodu suffers from a serious Molyneux complex: promising a ton of pie-in-the-sky awesome and delivering only a sliver of pie held to the ground by the tether of technological limits. If you want to create any sort of world with more than a few assets and each having more than a few lines of code, you’ll find that your terrain can’t be much larger than maybe half the size of Fallout 3’s Megaton, excluding building interiors. This is not to say Kodu is bad, I also like Black&White and Fable, I just mean that it is far more limited than I expected, and those expectations may be entirely of my own design. In addition to the editor, Kodu also features a friend sharing system and a supportive developer with a patch already in the works. Hopefully they can look into adding more content to the basic tools in the future. For what it is, a five dollar visual programming language and game editor, Kodu is an absolute steal for any XBL Community Games or PC gem hunter.As a side note, in order to play the game at all you must have your privacy setting set to allow all user created content.
