Kids Play Games, so Why Shouldn’t They Develop Them? Introducing Kodu Game Lab

Last year Micrsoft introduced its latest brainstorm, a kid-friendly, easy-to-use game creation application called Kodu that runs on the Xbox 360 platform. Retail is next to free at $5, and with Kodu for the PC, Microsoft seems to be trying to tap a market of game developers from the ground up, literally.

Now Microsoft has announced a preview release of Kodu which is designed to run on the PC. Currently it’s available for free to download so you, or your kids, can give it a spin and create games that you can play and show the masses. Suddenly your 6 year old could be the next big game creator.

The Kodu game IDE includes a feature set that includes tools, editors and characters which help to facilitate the transition from ideas the begin in your imagination, to live games that can entertain and entrall. The appeal of Kodu is its reasonable user interface, with icon-based menus, objects with actions which interact using commonly used commands such as “see”, “hear” and “scored.” The latest release of the PC-based version includes generral improvements, including the ability to save games as documents for emailing and storing,

This lightweight gaming IDE downloads at a mere 153MB and doesn’t even feature a set of system requirements. The relase price hasn’t been announced yet, but is likely to be priced at competitive prices similar to the Xbox 360 version.