Once the apple is eaten, it no longer exists in the world, so the character will then go after the next one and so on until no more apples remain. The bumped tile is Kodu’s way of telling when two characters are close to each other. Line 2 says that when the character bumps into the apple, it should eat it.

If there is more than one apple in the world, it automatically chooses the nearest to move toward. Line 1 says that if the character sees an apple, it should move toward it. For instance, the sample below shows how to program a character to find and eat all the apples in the game world. The kode is continuously evaluated so that it immediately reacts to any changes in the state of the world. The language is high level in the sense that a lot can be accomplished in a very few lines of “kode” compared to traditional programming.

The heart of Kodu is the tile-based programming language. Guided by this goal, we've tended to design new features so that they are simple and understandable rather than more complex and complete. The goal for Kodu has always been to be as easy as possible for new users. Since porting to the PC, support for keyboard, mouse, and touch have been added.

The choice of releasing on the Xbox informed much of the early UI development since everything needed to be done using a game controller. The original target platform was the Xbox 360 using C#, XNA, and releasing via the Indie Games Channel. Kodu originated as a project in Microsoft Research. Kodu allows creators to build the world's terrain, populate it with characters and props, and then program their behaviors and games rules in a bespoke visual programming language. Kodu Game Lab is a 3D game development environment that is designed to teach kids basic programming principles.

Download in the lab