Kodu: Game programming so easy, an adult can do it

I'm sure kids will take to Kodu—an easy-as-pie game creation app for Xbox Live—like ducks to water. Indeed, at Microsoft's CES keynote Wednesday night, a precocious 12-year-old named Sparrow wowed the audience as she worked the Kodu menus like an expert.

More surprising, however, is that even an old stick-in-the-mud like me wants to give Kodu a shot.

Set for release on the Xbox Live Community channel in the spring, Kodu isn’t a game so much as a game-authoring tool—although it looks much more fun than it sounds. You can pick a world, populate it with characters and objects, give 'em weapons and behaviors, and then test your creation to see if you’ve got a game on your hands.

The Kodu game editor itself couldn't be easier. Just like a real game programmer would, you build "if/when" scenarios for, say, the purple fish you created—except instead of keying in lines of code, you use the Xbox controller to pick and choose behaviors from large pinwheels of options, and you put the behaviors together like building blocks ("when the fish" / "sees something" / "or hears something" / "move closer" / "and fire a missile").

Once you're done building, you can take your new game for a whirl. Something not happening the way you expected (or is the game too easy, or too hard)? Just go back and tweak—kind of like what happens at the big gaming houses like EA and Capcom.

Note: Kodu is, of course, inviting much comparison to LittleBigPlanet, a recent (and acclaimed) game-creation app for PlayStation 3. I admit, I had LBP in my GameFly queue briefly before yanking it a bit later, thinking, well … why would I want to build a game, anyway?