The Kodu Challenge

The tables have turned! We made our own games with DIY game-tool Kodu, and Microsoft reviewed them. Will any of us make the grade?

Kodu is for kids. Straight up: Microsoft Research created the homebrew game-creation tool to let students make their own games and learn about programming in a fun and easy way. For adults who want to make independent games that run on Xbox 360, there’s the full-blown XNA Game Studio. For everyone else, there’s Kodu.

Well, we’re just like everyone else. We tried and failed to wrap our feeble minds around XNA, but we still had the lingering desire to make games. And if Kodu — a $5 Indie Game that makes, well, indie games — lets third-graders live out their game-creation fantasies, it should damn well work for us.

So after a few hours of messing about (really, only six or so per game), we asked Kodu’s creators at Microsoft Research to review our creations. That’s right — after years of passing judgment on games, we’re going to be on the receiving end. This could get ugly.

The Judges

Matthew MacLaurin
Lead “Kodu Game Lab” programmer, Microsoft

Matt is Kodu’s daddy, and the man knows his interactive stuff: He was a key member on the Windows Vista user-interface team. He’s also done a lot of work on data storage systems, worked at Apple back in the early ’90s, and was even a part of the team that worked on Myst Online at developer Cyan.

Scott Austin
Director of digitally distributed games, Microsoft

Scott joined Microsoft in 1999 and has been taking care of all that XBLA goodness for several years now. If it’s a downloadable game, it’s his bailiwick. He’s been intimately involved in the Community/Indie Games initiative, of which Kodu is a proud part.

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