Welcome to the Planet Kodu, Kodu Game Lab course

We’re thrilled to have you onboard!

This course is will take you through many aspects of game design using Kodu Game Lab, a programming platform developed by Microsoft.

We’ve scaled the materials in this course so that Kodu users of any level of ability can benefit from being involved. During this course, we’ll explore the practical nuts and bolts of how to create a game but also discuss the broader theory of games design.

This course will, we hope, give you a greater appreciation for what a game is, and what Kodu Game Lab is all about.

Timeframe

We’ve designed the course to be flexible to suit your schedule, so you won’t have to fit in with ours!

Though the course is over five weeks, we’re not expecting you to be in one place at any particular time. Dip in and out of the material during the week, or take it all in at one time. It’s up to you.

Giving something back

This is an interactive course, and we’ll be counting on your participation!

Each week there will be challenges and requests for your involvement. We’ll be asking for your feedback on a range of topics and of course, most importantly, we’ll want to see the games you’re building!

Delivery

We’ll deliver the course right here on the Planet Kodu website.

New material will be delivered in blog posts at the beginning of each week. This means that if you want to subscribe to the course RSS feed, you can have it delivered direct to your feed reader! You’ll still need to visit the Planet Kodu website to participate in certain sections of the course, but the core material will be provided on the blog.

Of course, you can share your game designs or responses to the course challenges anywhere you want! If you’d prefer to use your blog to reflect on your participation in the course, and upload your game creations there instead of Planet Kodu, that’s fine! Just don’t forget to link to your blog in the comments field on Planet Kodu so other course participants can keep track of what you’re doing.

What do I need to get started?

You’ll need Kodu Game Lab installed on your PC, and you can download the most recent version of Kodu here for free.

You’ll also want Microsoft Silverlight. Silverlight is also a free install that amongst other things, helps with the delivery of high definition video files. You need Microsofts Silverlight in order to get Kodu Game Lab up and running. Some videos may also need quicktime installed in order to view them.

What if I run into trouble during the course?

Problems with Kodu? Where can you turn if you need assistance during the course?

There are a number of ways in which you can seek out assistance during the course. Your first port of call should always been Kwestions, our online forum style resource that already holds the answers to many of the more common Kodu Game Lab questions.

If you can’t find your particular problem represented, you can simply ask it yourself in the Kwestions forum, and the Planet Kodu community will endeavor to answer it for you!

You can also turn to the Planet Kodu comments page for this course.

Finally, you can direct a course question to the Twitter account @planetkodu. We’ll respond as quickly as we’re able!