Binge Gamer writes: Kodu Game Lab is a newly released Community Game for Xbox 360. In my mind this always had the humorous hype of being the "Little Big Planet killer", though as more and more information came about, I understood it was something a little different.
Kodu is a "create a game" game, but does not hold itself to a specific genre of game you can create. In fact, it encourages you to try different things, racing, action adventure, rpg, side scrolling, even first person shooters. A game that offers so much has the downfall of not being easy.
Chris writes: The summer, does anyone remember that time of the year? A time when it was warm and the sun lit up the world past half-four in the afternoon? I do, and I have located an interview I did at the Wales Games Conference which took place back in June.
There was a stand for Kodu, a product from Microsoft Research which is in effect the forerunner to Project SPARK. I had the chance to speak to Stuart Ball from Microsoft Partners in Learning about what Kodu is, how Microsoft is helping with IT education in Britain and more.
from where I say students were excited and were getting interested. I was demoing Kodu, for younger kids, and XNA Game Studio for older kids and getting a lot of interest. Of course it helped that is was in the both next to Harmonex Music Systems. You may have heard of their games Rock Band 3 and Rock Band Beatles? And more! One of their designers came with the new Dance Central and a Kinect device for XBOX 360. Kinect it the new platform that lets you play games without a controller – it follows your body movements. Kinect doesn’t come out for another 10 days or so which means not many people have had a chance to play with it. A lot of people had the chance today though and if the reactions are anything like typical there will be a lot of Kinect and new Xbox 360s being bought over the next couple of months.
I would like to know how much money and resources would be needed to make a quality Kinect game, something that core gamers could be able to identify with
But do you want a halfass game to prove a point or do you want a truly inovative fresh game. If it is the latter, then you need to think about how long it takes to develope a good IP on console. Then you might want to factor in the fact that the developers have never worked on anything like this before. Do you really expect them to have anything with the depth the core players are use to before the end of next year?
But in the meantime: Sonic Free Riders, Fighters uncaged and Child of Eden are the closes to core games from what I have seen in the first wave. Star Wars will not come until next fall.
M$ did say they have 70 developer working on Kinect games. We shall see what next year brings.
"M$ did say they have 70 developer working on Kinect games. "
Whoa... really?
didn't know that.
Sounds like this thing is going to be exceptionally well supported by MS and developers.
That's what I like about MS - they actually suport their developers, whereas other companies just call them lazy.
"Then you might want to factor in the fact that the developers have never worked on anything like this before."
In what way? It's pretty similar to the PS2 eyetoy. I know it is a little more advanced, but, the basic features are the same. And going down to the basics and working your way up is how good games are made. It will take time to make a good IP though, it may take years I'll agree on that. If anything microsoft should have already made the killer app since they've been developing it for years, you'd think they'd have at least a couple internal studios churning out titles that use it's uniqueness to it's advantage since they have the R&D at hand and theoretically should know the ins and outs already.
How come Sony doesn't have a mind blowing hard core game for the Move? They were working on that before the Wii right?
I am not going to explain the differences between Eyetoy and Kinect anymore. Whats more, the only developer, that I am aware of, who worked on Eyetoy and is now working on Kinect, is Harmonics. Eye toy never got this level of support. So even if they were the same tech my stament is still relevant.
Microsoft has released Kodu, a game developed by Microsoft Research that lets users create their own worlds while teaching them the basics of game development, as a public beta for the PC. To get started, you'll need a Windows Live ID to apply for the beta on Microsoft Connect, where you'll be asked to fill out a 14-question "Kodu Academic Program Questionnaire."
Originally designed as a learning tool for youngsters using Xbox 360, Kodu was released a year ago as service with a powerful programming language that quickly became a hit in academic circles. Since its release, Kodu has been downloaded more than 200,000 times and is used in more than 60 educational institutions across the globe, according to Microsoft. Redmond thinks Kodu's biggest hurdle so far, however, has been that schools needed to purchase Xbox 360s, controllers, and so on to get started. Thus, the software giant has ported the tool to Windows as most educational institutes already have PCs with mice and keyboards.
