What is Kodu?

Kodu Game Lab is for building games!

Originally called Boku, Kodu is a programming environment designed by Microsoft for Windows and the Xbox 360.

Matthew MacLaurin, the director of the Redmond FUSE (Future Social Experiences) Lab and the game’s creator, designed Kodu to allow children to actively engage with computers rather than experiencing them passively. Kodu enables you to build games using a series of visual elements in a rich 3D environment, without having to learn a single line of code. Microsoft describe Kodu Game Lab as being ‘… designed to be accessible for children and enjoyable for anyone.’

The core of Kodu Game Lab is its intuitive user interface.

From the interface, you choose visual commands to determine the actions of the characters and environment, rather than having to type lines of code to build your games. Think of the commands as rules that the game characters and objects must follow.

In the example above, whenever the character sees an apple, they will move toward it. At the same time, whenever the character bumps into an apple, they will eat it.

What isn’t it?

While what you can build with Kodu is significant, there are limits to what you can achieve. Building games of expansive size with countless characters will tax the Kodu Game Engine.
Luckily, Kodu has a built in indicator to let you know when you’re stretching the game engine beyond it’s capacity.
A thermometer to the right of the screen indicates clearly whether your game is becoming too big to manage. If it is, it’s a simple matter of reducing the size of the game space, or removing peripheral characters from the game.
That’s not to say that Kodu can’t be used for building games of surprising complexity! What you can achieve with Kodu can be surprising.

Where do I start?

Start simple
There are a number of ways of approaching building a game, but our suggestion initially is to keep it simple. Our suggestion for your first attempt at building a game is to create a simple environment, and then program a bot (one of the characters you can place within the game) to perform some simple actions.
GDC 2009 review of Kodu
In this review by GDC, make shortly after the release of Kodu in 2009, the compares discuss the basic principles behind the game.
GDC review
Get some inspiration!
Watching what other users have created is always a great way to get ideas, and see how they have approached the game.
RPG Example
Space Dungeons
Download and edit
Download some of the games already created on the Planet Kodu website. You’ll also want to try the dozens of games that come preloaded with the Kodu Game Lab software. Play the games, look at the way the characters have been programmed, and then try to replicate it in your own game.
Final Note: Kodu Game Lab for PC is still in Beta, but the most recent version has removed the majority of bugs, and is now considered to be a far more stable release.