So I had the pleasure of asking Mark Finsh A Senior SDE in the Creative Systems Group at Microsoft some questions about Kodu. There has been some talk recently about Kodu possibly being able to compete with the clickteam range of products. Mark was nice enough to clear some things up, and tell us some really great news bits that should be really interesting to read for anyone that is making games right now! Here is the reply in its entire from Mark:
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Hi Rikus,
Thanks for your mail, and of course, for your interest. You’ve got a very cool site going there, and it’s great to see so much talent and energy getting put to creative and constructive use, on what looks like a wide variety of game types.
Here’s a link to a recent interview on Kodu, which might help give you a better idea of the space that we are moving into.
In particular, you might find some of the footage in the video helpful for getting a feel of the Kodu process.
Kodu is quite a bit different from something like ClickTeam, in more than just the 2d-3d jump.
For one thing, Kodu is the game play system as well as the game creator. When you play a game in Kodu, you always have the option to open up the game programming and modify it as you wish. Playing a game is really just a warm up to trying to improve the game.
Kodu is also much less open for content, and that is intentional. We are currently pushing the game design and logic programming aspects of game creation.
As to your question on how complex of a game you can make in Kodu, the answer is, very complex. And we’ve seen full games made spanning many genres of gameplay. However, you can’t make a game that looks like Halo, or Madden Football. We supply the look and physics, and you put it together and wrap it around gameplay programming. That’s the idea anyway.
It sounds to me like the sophistication of your members would be a better fit for the XNA Creators Club. http://creators.xna.com/en-US/
Kodu is built entirely on XNA Game Studio 3.0. I highly recommend it to people that want to program games in their spare time.
On release date, we’ll be shipping on the Xbox 360 this spring. We have PC builds out in select schools as part of an educational effort, but we don’t currently have plans for a commercial PC release.
I hope I’ve answered your questions somewhat. And mostly, right on right on with your Daily Click site. It’s really great to see that kind of creativity and enthusiasm.
Figured it was something like that. Just a jumpstart thing, nothing I'd really want to invest my efforts in. In MMF2, you can really make professional standalone games....
Kodu is more like Little Big Planet than MMF. I saw it at a presentation on a Microsoft conference in 2007. Maybe things have changed since then though.
Either way I think it'll be popular. It'll be good for kids and when they hit that limitation wall they might move on to MMF. It's good that there's more tools like this coming out though. I would have died for something like this in elementary school.
I found a video of Kodu on Youtube and it was all incredibly limited to what you can do or place into your map. It's nothing really special; Some 12 year old girl made a map with it. All you really do is set some premade events and premade objects and bam, your game is done. It's hilarious because the crowd was amazed by it all. I started when I was twelve and I knew more than she did.
Kodu\KOE-du\, crap:
Another petty attempt by Microsoft.
I dont think we are the target audience, i think this will be for many people a blessing and lots of folks will use it as a first step into the deep waters of game creation before moving on to mmf or xna.
I guess it's pretty helpful at the start of programming, but I think they'll like 3D over 2D only because they used Kodu first and just won't bother with Klik.
Heh, baaaaaaaad mistake.
But idk, I'd actually be abit more interested if it wasn't so dang limited.
And cheesy.
I mean the least they could do would be to add a model creator; I mean really- do us a favor, MS?
Even spore requires more creativity and that doesn't even have programming. If they actually let you do what you wanted I'd be interested but as of right now NO WAY.
I think it looks pretty good. Not the same as MMF, obviously, but I would love to make games for a console, with HWA (stable and complete HWA) and physics. If they let you send games to your friends I imagine it'll be a lot of fun.
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