The Kodu programming interface: Building blocks for creating a game.

[Editor's Note: Aaron Broder, 15, of Nashville, Tenn., a reporter for the Scholastic Kids Press Corps, blogs at allgeektout.com. He wrote this review of Microsoft Kodu on special assignment for TechFlash.]

Aaron Broder

The Kodu Game Lab on the Xbox Live Community Games channel is a new “game” from Microsoft Research that lets people try their programming chops through a visual interface. You can create fun and complex games using an Xbox 360 controller.

Kodu has a few obvious flaws. But even as it stands now, Kodu is a strong product, and has all sorts of potential applications, from getting kids interested in programming to maybe even rapid prototyping.

The heart of Kodu is the programming itself. Think of it like programming with Legos. There are different programming bricks that you put together to make a program. There are two primary types of bricks: conditions (“if this Kodu sees another Kodu...”), and actions (“then shoot towards that direction”).

The hardest part is learning to navigate. Once you’ve done that, you’ll be programming as quickly as your fingers can move. At first glance, it doesn’t seem that powerful. But when you start to really delve into the system, you learn that there’s a lot that you can do with it.

In less than 24 hours with Kodu, I created (in order from least complex to most complex): an exploration game where you play as a cloud, a recreation of Pac-Man, a platformer with a variety of power-ups (although I couldn’t figure out how to get platforms to float in mid air), and a game where you play as a tree firing off acorns at bikes that spawn faster and faster as time goes on.

All of these were coded in 30 minutes to an hour; most were coded under that. Even for complex programs, Kodu still remains quick and easy to use.

A Kodu landscape. (Click to enlarge.)

It isn’t perfect, of course. One thing I found annoying was having to constantly code and recode the movement controls in every game I made; no matter how fast you can code, nothing is more frustrating than repetition. I would like to see future versions of Kodu with a library of code snippets that are used in most games, to avoid unnecessary repetition.

Other than that, Kodu’s programming interface is lots of fun and easy to use.

Creating the surrounding environment for the game is not as much fun, or as easy. To clarify: it’s not that it’s difficult to make the environment, but it is if you have a specific look in mind for it. Whenever I started a blank map with an idea of what I wanted, I never managed to recreate it on the screen. My favorite levels always came from playing around with the tools and seeing what came out of it.

The organization of the tools is a little confusing at first. For example, the tool for raising and lowering the ground comes before the tool for actually making the ground. After an hour or two of playing with Kodu, though, I had a good grasp of navigating around, and could move pretty quickly.

What Kodu really needs is a good tutorial. They have tutorial levels, but they don’t actually teach you anything. All they do is give you a set-up, and tell you what to program; no hints on how to do so. Because I had seen Kodu before while covering the Consumer Electronics Show, I was able to pick it up pretty quickly, but I’m not sure if everyone (especially kids, who are definitely a target market for this) could as well.

However, Kodu mostly makes up for this with the complete (although simple) games provided. This is one of the best ways to learn how to program in Kodu, since you get to see the code and what it makes happen just seconds apart. It’s fun to pull apart the code and make your own tweaks to it, in some ways more fun than creating a world from scratch, since I found world-building such a pain. (I should note, however, that this is not always an effective way to learn; one level, a golf simulator, while very impressive, had such a complex program that I couldn’t understand it at all).

I was really disappointed to learn that none of these games were multiplayer, something that I could not figure out how to program. Adding salt into the wound was that there was even a tag for multiplayer games. I would expect that they would include examples of all the major gameplay types to help people learn how to code them.

One of Kodu’s biggest flaws isn’t revealed until after you’ve finished your first level: sharing. On the Xbox 360, which has the best online service of the three current gen consoles, you would expect a pretty good level sharing set-up, right? Wrong. You can only share Kodu levels with people on your friends list and you have to all be online at the same time. I understand why they would want to do this to prevent inappropriate materials from getting to kids but if LittleBigPlanet (which arguably has tools that make it easier to create inappropriate material) can have public level publishing, Kodu should be able to as well.

At the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year, Microsoft said they would be making new content packs for Kodu, so I strongly hope that alongside those, they will be making updates to the core software.

Kodu, available for download on Microsoft's Xbox Live, is priced at 400 Microsoft "points," or $5.

Follow Aaron Broder at allgeektout.com and @allgeektout. He will be attending the Digital Media Academy at Stanford University this summer, learning the Python and C++ programming languages.