14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft announced having released Kodu Game Lab on the Xbox Live Community Games channel on Wednesday. The company is describing the fresh offering as a “new visual programming language” and it’s charging 5 USD for the chance to try and create videogames with it.
The publisher is saying that the way games are built is easy enough to allow even kids to put together small and simple gaming experiences. Xbox 360 users in the United States, Canada, France, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom can now try it out.
Kodu was initially named Boku and Microsoft revealed it probably as a direct reaction to the way LittleBigPlanet managed to capture the hearts and minds of PlayStation 3 gamers with its ability to put together levels using the powerful toolset provided. Kodu is based on icons and not on traditional programming language commands to put together scenarios. The Xbox 360 controller is used to navigate the menus and to select actions.
The whole package was created by no more than six people working at Microsoft Research. Matthew MacLaurin, who is a principal program manager in the creative Systems Group at Microsoft Research, posted on the Kodu blog that “I'm sure we missed something. We are standing by to fix any bugs the minute they appear and to flip a service build quickly if necessary. I've been in software long enough to be quite sure we'll need a refresh at some point.”
It would have been nice if Microsoft had chosen to make Kodu available for free to all those interested. After all, LittleBigPlanet sold because it included a variety of nicely done single player levels, which provided both tutorial and inspiration for players to create something new, while Kodu is nothing but a toolset and most players will not see any incentive to pay for it.