Hello Kodu!

Ah, Kodu has finally hit the creators club playtesting forum. I started using it yesterday. It is a lot different than what I had imagined it to be. It is also far more.

A few people are voicing their concerns that upon loading Kodu, they are overwhelmed with the amount of choices available. The developers have loaded Kodu with quite a few starter worlds for you to mess around with. A few tutorial levels, some racing games, and a number of levels that are basically clones of classic arcade games we all know and love. Games like Space Invaders, Frogger, Pinball, Whack-A-Mole,Break Out, etc..

They aren't exact clones of course, but done in the Kodu style. What is this style you ask? For starters, Most things that you will be directly controlling in this game are called bots. There are a number of different bots. The kodu, two types of fish, a unitrike, a flying saucer and many more.

Each bot has different default settings for speed and friction and various other things.

The first level I tried was tutorial number 3. The terrain is basically a small valley with a river in the middle of it. You take control of a unitrike who at the moment can only be controlled by the left thumbstick. Theres a kodu nearby so I motored up to it. He told me to try and jump across the river to reach the other kodu on the other side. But how do I jump?

Easy! Just press start to go into edit mode, select the trike and press Y to program. Add an instruction for

WHEN Gamepad,A
DO jump

Then just press start to go back into play mode. A now makes the unitrike jump. There are various options you can set to control height, speed, direction, etc.. of the jump as well.

Simple.

Once my unitrike had jumped across the river a few times I wanted to do more.After about an hour or two I had turned this level into a game where you control a flying saucer and when you approach the first kodu he tells you that his friend across the river is hungry and needs some apples. I had placed a tree and some apples nearby. The saucer could pick up apples and deliver them to the other kodu. Once the other kodu got enough apples he started jumping for joy lol! I also had programmed in a factory with a door that would open when the 2nd kodu got enough apples.

I had planned to have the saucer fly into the factory door, and then have Kodu load another level. I don't think this is possible however. Its certainly possible to teleport within a level though, and to have different bots on the screen when different conditions are met or not met. Each bot can have up to six different pages of instructions, I can tell you right now that it's not going to be enough.

One thing I am interested in is the dialogue system in the game, if you are too, I would suggest investing in a wireless keyboard or a chatpad if you prefer. I found myself using multiple pages of instructions for a very simple dialog tree. Perhaps there is a better way though, to be found with some more experimentation.

Anyway, the Kodu devs released a new build today to playtest and after loading it onto my Xbox I found that both of my worlds had been erased. Oh well. Always more to create!
So today I just messed around a bit.