Today we are releasing what we are calling Planet Kodu version 2. It has been a lot of work but we’re really excited with the changes.
The biggest change is the introduction of the Kodu Kwestions part of the site and the announcement of the Game Design with Kodu course but we’ve also updated the challenges section.
Kodu Kwestions are wiki based kwestions (questions) and answers, designed to produce high quality information about game design and development with Kodu Game Lab. The aim of Planet Kodu Kwestions is to produce high quality kwestions and answers by mixing the best bits of forums, wikis and voting systems. We like it a lot.
We’ve launched Kodu Kwestions as beta, with some of the user restrictions being relaxed during the beta period. Once out of beta users will need a certain amount of points to vote and edit kwestions and answers, we will publish more about the points structure before we exit the beta stage. Kodu Kwestions replaces the tutorial and forum section of Planet Kodu, they are still there but we’ve removed the links from the top menu. We’ve started moving the content across and we plan to complete the migration this week. We must mention that Planet Kodu Kwestions owes alot to Stack Overflow for being the inspiration.
Please, check out Kodu Kwestions, ask a kwestion, but more importantly answer a kwestion!
The second major announcement is that Planet Kodu will host an open online course on Game Design with Kodu starting March 1st 2010.
The course will be open to everyone and totally free and involve blog posts, video and live sessions. We’re putting the curriculum together at the moment but we’ve posted the outline on the course overview page. Participants can contribute via the course website or by using their own blogs and other social media. To participate go to the Course blog and click on the sign up link in the side bar.
The third major change is the revamp of the Challenges section. We’ve taken advantage of the export and import functionality that has been introduced to Kodu Game Lab to make the challenge section really interesting. Firstly you download the challenge file and then once you’ve solved the challenge you can upload it as evidence of your success. Initially your solution will be listed as a proposed solution until someone else who is “qualified” accepts it. Those who have previously had a solution accepted for the challenge can assess other proposals or if some completes three different challenges then they can assess the solutions for any challenge. Make sense?
We’d love to hear to hear what you think of the changes, please use the comments below to let us know!
I’m liking the idea of having challenges and I hope to see more of them in the future. However this site still gives me a few issues. First being that the badges tab disappears when you are in the kwestions part of the site. Another being that when I logged in earlier I was somehow redirected to the admin area. Though I had no controls, you should get that fixed. Also a question, will you be bringing back the forums?
Hi thanks for the comment.
We like the challenge idea as well and yes plan to add some more. We have a couple of ideas but if you have some suggestions we’d love to hear them.
Thanks for the letting us know about the badges bug. The site is built on a CMS so the backend, the backend you access will only let you edit/delete your own posts. We did have a redirect working to auto spit you back out if you’re not an admin I’ll look into that it may have gone missing in the upgrade. There are still a few bugs we need to iron out – we are working **** them. We’re also trying to find some time to make some more games!
About the forums (and tutorials), love to hear what you think, and really I’m not sure – are they needed, my leaning is that the kwestions part of the site should replace both?
Well I think it’s a matter of what audience you wish to appeal to. I notice as of now this site is more leaned towards students and teachers. Though, I wish this site was bigger and filled with a variety of users. A forum is usually a good start at building a community. Kwestions was a nice addition to the site and should definitely stick around, but perhaps having a forum could bring in more users.
Moving on to the tutorial part of the site… I thought it was well done and should stay as well. I really like the wiki type of system it uses. Working together with Kwestions, it should serve to answer any question as well as teach the user how to do certain things in kodu. Perhaps certain users in the future could contribute further to the tutorials on how to do more advanced coding.
I say mop up the tabs a bit so they work correctly on every page. Also the Badge system and these “points” you once posted about… I’m guessing your still working on it? Would be nice to see them working some time. The profile system tends to bug me a bit as well. If you do plan to make this site more open to everyone perhaps make that easier so if I wanna find a game from a certain person I can actually find their profile and look at their games. As of now it says I have 4 games but I haven’t uploaded anything, so the profile system appears to be messed up.
Those screencast videos you made “I’m guessing” are good, but I notice it lags. They are still watchable but I’m curious as to what setup you had? Such as what screen recorder you used. If you plan on making more videos I could perhaps help with making the videos smoother by recommending you CamStudio. It’s a free application and if you know how to set up the right settings it can be a quite good screen recorder. http://camstudio.org/
Well, I rambled on for quite a bit now didn’t I? Sorry about that. Anyway, this site is coming along good just need to get the message out to people that Kodu is for PC now and this site is the answer to all Kodu PC related content.
Thanks for taking the time to give such a great reply.
Why do you think this site is more leaned to students and teachers?
The site was setup initially to support schools but since then we’ve opened up. The only thing I think we’re doing that is aimed towards teachers and students is to monitor and moderate the content to make sure nothing inappropriate stays too long on the site. I’d be interested to hear more from you about this as we’ve tried hard to update the site to make sure it has a wide global appeal.
Thanks for the comments about the tutorials – yes, I’m really bad at them, they took so much longer than they should. Martin thinks that they should stay I think they should go. No one else has ever contributed to a tutorial I think kwestions could replace the tutorials and the forum. But I hear what you’re saying about building community – maybe we do need the forums or maybe kwestions needs an “off topic” or “general discussion” section for which points and not earned and the wiki features are turned off. We’ll discuss this. As a side note a fair bit of our search engine traffic goes to the tutorials so that is why it still sits up (and that Martin is still linking to it!)
Thanks for the tip about camstudio Bruce and Martin said the same thing – if I ever make another one I’ll try it out. I’m also wondering whether screencasts could be used to show challenges – where having the file and code would run the challenge. eg the double jump?
Thanks again for you comments we really appreciate it, we are getting a fair bit of traffic, I think getting some games up will be a key driver in getting the site going – that’s why I made a game yesterday and plan to make more in the next few days. Rest assured we are working on the badges and the other bugs you and others have let us know about.
You know, I’m not really sure why. Guess I wasn’t really thinking about it… I guess I’m just use to seeing site with forums.
I never said you were bad at them, haha. You did quite good, it’s just the quality of the video that concerns me. The thing that I like about tutorials is that people could learn some interesting bits of code and go try them out. It would sort of be like your Course but you wouldn’t have to actually be there and if people ha questions they can go to kwestions to get answers. A off topic or general area really doesn’t seem like the right thing to add to kwestions. If most of your traffic is going to tutorial, then shouldn’t you just bring it back? Couldn’t you also create a new search engine for games? If this site does get flooded with games search options are great.
Screencasts for challenge solutions would be nice for those who learn better visually. Just make screencasts for everything! Hah, well perhaps not. As for Camstudio, I suggest getting the divx codec if you plan on using camstudio.
It’s nice to hear you are working on things, I can see that. I got a game that I am working on that I plan to add hopefully today. It shows off a lot of coding… yet it’s a pretty simple game.
Sounds great looking forward to playing your game.
Ermm… How do you make a game?
We have a course starting March 1st on Game Design with Kodu.
Also have a look at http://planetkodu.com/kwestions/4/how-do-i-get-started-with-kodu-game-lab/ and the http://planetkodu.com/tutorials/view/Main_Page
How can you create user defined graphics?
pariah’s right. some of the links appear to be broken!!!
cool
kool
kool
It would be nice if V2 was available on Windows, Mac and Linix. Then there would be a lot more users of the Game Lab.
Wowee can’t wait. I’m getting quite bored of V1. Upgrades beep bop!
kOOL