We talk to the creators of Kodu, the 360's upcoming videogame creation tool

Two guys are sitting in a cafe, a coffeemarked napkin sitting under a mug of steaming liquid. One of them has come up with an idea for a brilliant videogame, the likes of which have never been seen before. “It will be so fresh,” he gushes, “with poisonous penguins and toxic toilets and lots of soldiers and guns and… and…” He scribbles his ideas down on a napkin. “It’s a cross between Manic Miner and Call Of Duty.” A beaming grin flies across his face.

Back in reality and this guy realises there is one problem: he cannot program. A programming language may as well be Sanskrit for all he is able to understand it. The napkin crumbles, the dream is shattered. It is one more fantastic idea left blowing in the wind and this man is crestfallen. He’s just hit upon the major barrier to entry as a fledgling games designer, and his talents may well just go elsewhere.

Step forward Kodu, a basic programming-tool- turned-XNA-game, which was announced during Microsoft’s keynote at CES earlier this year and released on the Xbox Live Community Games channel. It allows users of the Xbox 360 to design their own titles with no programming skills required, giving the chance to unleash any frustrated game designing creativity within the minds of players.

“It started as a way to help kids learn how to program, but what it’s turned into is a way to not only learn how to program, but to create your own games,” says Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices Division. That it is aimed at a younger audience shows just how accessible it is supposed to be. Indeed, Microsoft introduced 12-year-old Sparrow Buerer during the announcement, and she was able to demonstrate her programming skills with ease.

Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft's entertainment and devices division

“Kodu is scratching an itch that probably everyone in the industry has been feeling since the Eighties,” Matt MacLaurin, the principal program manager for Microsoft Research and lead designer of Kodu told X360. “Game development – particularly the coding part, whatever the language – is perhaps the only truly modern art form here in the 21st Century. Up until now it’s been used primarily for big budget blockbusters, but to ensure that the game industry keeps growing and evolving, we need to make it really, really easy for innovation to take root.”

Kodu has been created by just four people, and the language it uses is simple and entirely icon-based. It’s like a simplified version of XNA Game Studio, which does require basic programming knowledge, but instead of getting deep with lines of code, the gaming concepts of vision, hearing and time control are physically represented. The program was formerly known as Boku and it has been created by Microsoft Research, which hopes the tool will encourage more people to take up programming as a career. For this reason, as well as running on the Xbox 360, it also works on the PC, opening it up to as wide an audience as possible.

“In every creative medium, it is the voice of the individual creator that is most directly responsible for breakthroughs,” says MacLaurin. “Games are no different; just as we have seen legendary authors and movie directors like Jim Cameron and Martin Scorsese create entire new genres, innovation and game design comes down to creators and their visions. But how do we go about finding the next Jim Cameron?

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