Brier Dudley, writing in his blog for The Seattle Times, has confirmed a 30th June release date for Microsoft’s Kodu project, and a price of 400
. The game will be released on the Xbox Live Community Games channel.
Kodu is a games creation interface which has been likened to LittleBigPlanet, but can create games in any genre. Kodu was designed from the ground up with the Xbox 360 controller in mind, using a visual programming language which, it’s claimed, is so simple that even a child could create a game with it.
Using pictures and graphics in place of code, playable games can be created from scratch in minutes, and while it remains to be seen just how good the created games can be, the interface certainly looks like it can offer a huge amount of depth for anyone with the imagination to take advantage of it.
A brief overview of its features is listed on the official project website:
Kodu provides an end-to-end creative environment for designing, building, and playing your own new games.
- High-level language incorporates real-world primitives: collision, color, vision
- Uses Xbox 360 Game Controller for input — no keyboard required
- Runs on XBox 360 and PC
- Interactive terrain editor
- Bridge and path builder
- Terrain editor – create worlds of arbitrary shape and size
- 20 different characters with different abilities