That most hated of typefaces, Comic Sans, gets anthropomorphized and bad-assified in Mike Lacher’s piece for McSweeney’s titled, (in)appropriately enough, I’m Comic Sans, Asshole.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

“Truck Nutz” let you communicate to the world that you’re a bold and sassy guy in a way that words just can’t convey, but what if you don’t have a truck? For that Truck Nutz message without truck ownership, this iPhone case might fit the bill:

Cartoonist Chris Onstad came up with this idea back in January 2006 with this surreal and funny Achewood comic in which Ray Smuckles comes up with “ChatSacks”:

If someone will make one for a Windows Phone 7 device, I’ll buy one of those cases.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

This image actually had me rolling out of my chair laughing. Click it to see it at full size:

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

Once again, my friend and former co-worker (I worked at his startup, OpenCola, during “The Bubble”) Cory Doctorow is holding the Canadian launch of his latest novel, For the Win.

Here’s the publisher’s blurb about the book:

In the virtual future, you must organize to survive

At any hour of the day or night, millions of people around the globe are engrossed in multiplayer online games, questing and battling to win virtual “gold,” jewels, and precious artifacts. Meanwhile, others seek to exploit this vast shadow economy, running electronic sweatshops in the world’s poorest countries, where countless “gold farmers,” bound to their work by abusive contracts and physical threats, harvest virtual treasure for their employers to sell to First World gamers who are willing to spend real money to skip straight to higher-level gameplay.

Mala is a brilliant 15-year-old from rural India whose leadership skills in virtual combat have earned her the title of “General Robotwalla.” In Shenzen, heart of China’s industrial boom, Matthew is defying his former bosses to build his own successful gold-farming team. Leonard, who calls himself Wei-Dong, lives in Southern California, but spends his nights fighting virtual battles alongside his buddies in Asia, a world away. All of these young people, and more, will become entangled with the mysterious young woman called Big Sister Nor, who will use her experience, her knowledge of history, and her connections with real-world organizers to build them into a movement that can challenge the status quo.

The ruthless forces arrayed against them are willing to use any means to protect their power—including blackmail, extortion, infiltration, violence, and even murder. To survive, Big Sister’s people must out-think the system. This will lead them to devise a plan to crash the economy of every virtual world at once—a Ponzi scheme combined with a brilliant hack that ends up being the biggest, funnest game of all.

Imbued with the same lively, subversive spirit and thrilling storytelling that made LITTLE BROTHER an international sensation, FOR THE WIN is a prophetic and inspiring call-to-arms for a new generation.

The event takes place tonight at 6:30 p.m. in the Merril Collection of the Lillian H. Smith building (a.k.a. “The Library”) at 239 College Street, just east of Spadina. Perhaps a post-launch visit to Caplansky’s is in order.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

The Hand Eye Society describes itself as a “not-for-profit coalition of people and projects in support of Toronto’s videogame communities”. Their goals are:

1. To help people make games
2. To connect game makers with each other and with an audience, offline
3. To foster diversity in game creation and public perception of games

I shouldn’t be surprised that one of the people behind the Hand Eye Society is Jim Munroe. He’s a former Adbusters editor turned self-publishing author of a number of enjoyable science fiction books such Flyboy Action Hero Comes with Gasmask and Angry Young Spaceman, developer of indie games including the interactive fiction piece Punk Points (the online version requires Java), maker of movies and all-round Toronto DIY-espousing creative type.

Also connected with the Hand Eye Society are other indie videogame notables including:

• Capy (whom you might know as Capybara Games)
• Superbrothers
• Metanet
• Queasy Games
• RSBLSB (short for “Right Square Bracket, Left Square Bracket”)

The Hand Eye Society is throwing a social this Thursday, May 27th in Toronto at Unit Bar (1198 Queen Street West, a shade east of Dufferin/Gladstone, halfway between the Drake and Gladstone hotels). The doors will open at 7:00 and there may be a set of curated videogames for you to check out.

At 8:00 p.m. special guest dignitary Brandon Boyer, Chairman of the Independent Games Festival and contributing editor for Boing Boing and Boing Boing’s games blog Offworld, will, as the Hand Eye Society’s blog puts it, “deliver some form of immensely significant communication to the assembled videogame creators, enthusiasts, organizers & slack-jawed onlookers.”

If I weren’t going to be in Montreal that evening for the Make Web Not War conference, I’d most certainly at this event (I’ll definitely catch the next social). If you’re in Toronto and love videogames (especially ones that break from the mainstream) and especially if you love making them, catch the Hand Eye Society’s social this Thursday!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

The blog Geeks are Sexy put together a wonderful alphabet rhyme using Creative Commons “share-alike”-licensed photos on Flickr, which I thought I’d share with you:

Here’s the text of the rhyme, along with a credit for each corresponding photo:

A is for Away Team, where you should never wear red (mild mannered photographer)
B is for Binary, 1s and 0s in your head (jpstanley)
C is for Cosplay, making cons an awesome place
D is for Doctor, who keeps changing face (great beyond)
E is for Emoticons, that tell you what we’re feeling (neal gillis)
F is for Flickr, whose photos we are “stealing” (tricky)
G is for Gadgets, the way to our heart (slipstreamjc)
H is for Hardware, I took it apart! (jurvetson)
I is for iEverything, love it or hate it (dan dickinson)
J is for Japan, we’re glad Nintendo invaded (oscar mota)
K is for Keyboard, we love every letter (andrew*)
L is for Leias, the more the better! (koadmunkee)
M is for MMORPGs, it’s a magical place (i eated a cookie)
N is for NASA, and the beauty of space (nasa1fan)
O is for Occipital Lobe, we love using our brains (illuminaut)
P is for Programming, ((though lisp is a pain)) (phil_jackson)
Q is for Quilting, and other geeky crafts (athenamat)
R is for Reading, no matter what the path (timonoko)
S is for Science, though the cake is a lie (don solo)
T is for Tabletop, and a 20-sided die (nengard)
U is for Uncertainty, you just never know (neil crosby)
V is for Voltage, oh the places we’ll go! (oskay)
W is for the World Wide Web, it’s more than just porn (shimown)
X is for Xerox, where so much geekiness was born (marc smith)
Y is for Youth, since kids are geeks too (benmcleod)
Z is for Zork, watch out for the grue! (the_tml)

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

What happens when you take computing’s proto-heroes Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, turn them into characters in a steampunk adventure television series with a title sequence lifted directly from Space: 1999? You get Albion: 1849, a series with a themes similar to The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne.

[Found via 2D Goggles, via Rob Miles’ blog.]

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

Make Web Not War is a cross-platform conference focusing on web development in mixed open source and commercial environments. Make Web Not War is jointly sponsored by Microsoft, our friends at PHP Quebec and open source communities across Canada. We’re proud to be a part of MonDev, Montréal’s Open Source Week, which takes place from May 24th through 28th, 2010.

About Make Web Not War

Make Web Not War is a free-as-in-beer event taking place on Thursday, May 27th featuring free-as-in-speech software development. Among other things, you’ll get to:

• Mingle with some of the best web developers in the country
• Listen and learn from industry experts and leaders
• Play with some of the new and exciting toys being offered by Microsoft
• See who gets crowned as Canada’s top developer at the FTW! Coding Competition
• Attend the VIP party held in the heart of beautiful Montréal

Make Web Not War’s schedule has two tracks:

• The Main Track, which covers new opportunities and the business impact of interoperability on the web. Its sessions will be short presentations followed by roundtable discussion with the panelists and Q&A.
• The Developer Track, which are hands-on sessions covering interoperable tools and technologies.

Make Web Not War will take place at Reunion, located at 6600 Hutchison:

Want to Attend Make Web Not War?

Registration is free – just visit the registration page and sign up!

About MonDev

MonDev, Montréal’s Open Source Week, runs from Monday, May 24th through Friday, May 28th. It’s a celebration of Open Source technology and community throughout the Montréal area and features many events, including:

• Demo Ignite Camp
• Startup Drinks
• WebCamp
• Make Web Not War

From MonDev’s “About” Page:

By encouraging local and international partnerships, Open Source developers are creating free software that can be continuously updated and shared. For many software innovators, Open Source represents the future transformation of software development.

Through Open Source, communities, cities and nations around the world are presented with the opportunity to promote and actively nurture an environment of learning, collaboration and innovation.

Montréal is an important centre of global Open Source activity and home to many software developers, projects and companies. Open Source Week will bring together industry leaders, teachers and students from around the world for a full week of activities that will include workshops, seminars and presentations.

Take the DEVTrain to Montreal — $50 Round Trip!

Microsoft Canada’s Technical Evangelism team – Yours Truly included – will be taking the train to Montreal, and we want you to ride with us! We’ve booked an entire car, and we’re bringing the Xbox, Rock Band (and hopefully Red Dead Redemption) and other goodies, and since it’s VIA Rail, there’ll be wifi and power aplenty, and good company and conversation, of course! Best of all, we’re subsidizing the trip – you can travel from Toronto to Montreal on Tuesday morning, depart Montreal for Toronto on Friday, and it’ll cost you only $50!

What’s on the train?

• Power and wifi
• We’re sponsoring a meal and a drink
• A chance to mingle with Toronto’s web developer community (you’ve got about 6 hours to make friendships and even collaborate)
• A chance to meet Microsoft Canada’s Technical Evangelism team – a fine bunch
• The cheapest, most comfortable round trip to Montreal you’re going to find!

Want to travel on the cheap in in high geeky style? Take the train with us – email cdnsol@microsoft.com to get the invitation to ride.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Okay, I get the missing “13” (bad luck in Western cultures) and no numbers with “4” in them (bad luck in Chinese and Japanese cultures), and the –1 is clever, but where’s the zero? C’mon Asian people, we’re supposed to be good at math!

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

My tech show for kids, Developer Junior, premieres today on Butterscotch.com! In this episode, Junior (the puppet) and I (the human) take a look at the Kodu game builder system and go through a quick tutorial:

Developer Junior is a show on Butterscotch.com aimed at the younger set and is all about helping kids make the most out of the technology in their everyday lives. It’s about writing programs, creating media, playing games, and having fun with technology. (It’s also a dream come true for me – I always thought I’d be a great host for a kid’s show.)

There’s another episode coming up, in which Junior and I walk through the process of making a movie using Live Movie Maker. Watch for it!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Every job has its tedious part, but my job has an unusually high number of moments of pure awesomeness, such as those pictured below. I’ll explain more about the project later, but for now, enjoy the photos!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

“FTW” has been known to stand for many things, but in the case of the FTW! Coding Competition, it means “For The Web” (as well as “For The Win”). The FTW Coding Competition is part of our Make Web Not War event taking place on Thursday, May 27th in Montreal.

What is the FTW! Coding Competition?

The FTW! Coding Competition is your chance to show off your web development skills and compete for some great prizes. We’re looking for people to either:

• Write a new web application or
• Port an existing web application

as long as it falls under one of these categories:

• PHP application running on Internet Information Server (that’s our web server) and Windows Server (that’s our server OS)
• Windows Azure (that’s our cloud computing environment) application, written in any language that works on it (C#, Visual Basic .NET, PHP, Ruby and Python)
• Open Government application (using any of the Open Data catalogues on Windows Server or Windows Azure, using any programming language)

What Can I Win?

The prizes for the FTW! Coding Competition are:

First Place: The Dell Office Computer Makeover

I’m tempted to take this off the prize list and keep it for myself. It’s made up of all these goodies:

• Dell Precision Workstation 15” notebook computer
• Notebook stand and port replicator
• 27” widescreen LCD monitor
• Wireless keyboard and mouse
• Ferguson Hill FH007 sound system

Second Place: The Home/Office System

A nice package for bouncing between home and the office.

• Dell Precision Workstation 14” notebook computer
• Ferguson Hill FH007 sound system

Third Place: The Road Warrior

A very portable and powerful system for the coder on the go. This one’s for all you “cafe coders”!

• Dell Adamo XPS 13 notebook computer

Bonus Prizes

We’re awarding bonus prizes for submitted apps that we feel worthy of the following superlatives. You can win these on their own or in combination with the first, second and third place prizes!

• Best Azure Application:
  • Ultraportable Dell Vostro V13 notebook computer
  • Dell M109S portable DLP projector
• Best PHP Application:
  • Dell Studio One 19” all-in-one computer
• Best Open Government Application:
  • Dell Studio Hybrid ultra-compact desktop computer
• Best Application Using Microsoft SQL Server:
  • Sharp 32” LCD TV
  • Blu-Ray disc player
• Best Student Application:
  • Xbox 360 Elite
  • 6 Xbox 360 games
  • 2 Xbox 360 controllers
  • 22” LCD TV
  • Logitech X-540 surround speaker system

What’s the Deadline?

In order to be eligible, you have to submit your web application by Monday, May 10th, 2010 at 8:00 a.m. Eastern. So get working!

Where Can I Find Out More about the FTW! Coding Competition?

You can find out more about the FTW! Coding Competition, including all the terms and conditions of the competition, at the FTW! Coding Competition site.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

The comic below, created by John Campbell, is a snarky but amusing deconstruction of Star Trek: The Next Generation:

I always found it funny that the “empathic” character Deanna Troi had the power to sense plainly obvious emotions and painful that they had to explain bits of human behaviour that one should’ve picked up by the end of adolescence. That being said, much of the show’s audience was teenage boys, and teens often figure out the world through stories, so why not explain that stuff? And as someone much wiser than me once said, science fiction is a sandwich: once you’ve gotten past the bread of aliens and future tech and the thin slices of plot meat, it’s all about the thick moral mayo.

The last panels in this comic had me laughing out loud, especially since I imagined the line as delivered by actor (and dater-of-inapproriately-young-women, the lucky bastard) Patrick Stewart himself, using that William. Shatner. Mode. Of. Delivery.

In case it’s not apparent who the comic figures are, here’s a quick guide…

Captain Jean-Luc Picard

Commander William Riker

Lt. Commander Data

Lt. Commander Deanna Troi

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

Photo courtesy of M Thru F.

I assume that someone did this using this trick.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

Actually, from left to right, it’s me, Ward Bell of IdeaBlade and Microsoft’s Glenn Block, whom John Bristowe and I interviewed in the most recent Ignite Your Coding webcast. Ward and Glenn have forgotten more about building composite apps than I will ever learn. If you attended the “Building Composite Applications with WPF and Silverlight” session in my track at TechDays Canada 2009, you saw what was essentially Ward’s presentation; he’s the only reason I know anything about Prism.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

A New Windows for the Phone

Ever since joining The Empire, I’ve been saying that Windows Mobile needs to go back to the drawing board. While there was good technology lying in its innards – mobile versions of the .NET framework, SQL Server and Office – treating the mobile form factor as “the desktop, but much, much smaller”, was the wrong approach. In the meantime, the Esteemed Competition were doing the right thing: designing their phones’ OS features and interface from the ground up rather than attempting to force-fit the desktop UI into a pocket UI.

Today at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Microsoft previewed the latest in a series of steps forward – consider Xbox to Xbox 360, Windows Vista to Windows 7, Live Search to Bing – there’s now Windows Phone 7 Series.

(The name’s a bit long. Whoever does the naming at Microsoft corporate HQ must get paid by the syllable.)

A Quick Look at Windows Phone’s Experience

A good starting point is this video, which covers Windows Phone’s features in three minutes, thirty seconds:

You can take an interactive tour of the UI at the Windows Phone 7 Series site:

A Closer Look at the Windows Phone Experience

Over at Channel 9, Laura Foy has posted her interview with Joe Belfiore, VP Windows Phone 7 Program Management, who gave her a walkthrough of the goodies in Windows Phone (the video is 22 minutes, 18 seconds):

Some quick notes from the video:

• There are three mandatory hardware buttons, which are context-sensitive:
  • Back
  • Windows (the “Start” button)
  • Search
• The screen is a capacitive touch-screen, capable of supporting multi-touch
• The Start menu is built up of tiles: little block representing the information and features that you care most about
  • You can add your own custom tiles; Joe shows a “me” tile linked to his Facebook profile
• A browser with:
  • Snappy performance
  • Support for multitouch actions such as pinch zoom, double-tap to zoom and finger drag
  • Very readable text, that to sub-pixel positioning in HTML
  • Phone number recognition in HTML documents; touch them to dial them
  • Street address recognition in HTML documents; touch them to get a map
  • Multiple tabs
• The “People Hub”
  • Aggregates Exchange, Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and other mail contacts
  • Provides a live feed of your contacts
• Context-sensitive search:
  • Press the “Search” button while in the People Hub, and you search your people list
  • Press the “Search” button while in the Start menu, and it runs a web search
    • Based on your query, it knows whether to give you a web search result or a local search result
    • In the demo, Joe does a search for pizza and gets a map and results for pizzerias near him, and a quick pan over to adjacent pages yield directions and reviews
    • A tap on “nearby” yield the locations of useful things like parking, ATMs and so on near the selected pizzeria
    • In another demo search, Joe does a search for “Avatar” and it returns a list of nearby theatres and times for the movie Avatar; a quick pan to an adjacent page yields the results for local business and places with “Avatar” in the name
• Email:
  • Easy pivoting between unread, flagged and urgent emails
  • A caching system prevents you from seeing the dreaded “loading” screen
  • Press “Search” within email and you perform a search of your email messages, by subject, text and so on
• Rotation: you can operate the phone in “portrait” or “landscape” mode
• Calendar:
  • Support for both work and personal calendars
• ActiveSync works in the background and keeps the phone synced with email, contacts and calendar
• User-customizable UI colour schemes
• The “Pictures Hub”
  • Gallery: Lets you browse all the pictures on your phone
  • Mosaic: Recent and favourite pictures
  • What’s New: New photos from your social networks
  • Camera roll: A folder for photos taken with your phone
  • Support for photo albums from Facebook and Windows Live, which you browse as if they lived right on your phone
• Music and Video
  • History: Most recently played music and videos
  • New: New music and videos added since the last sync
  • Zune HD-style marketplace searching and support for Zune subscriptions with unlimited music plays
• The “Me” tile
  • Lets you update your status on places like Facebook
  • Nice little typing features like auto-spelling-correction and a special soft keyboard for emoticons
• The UI concept: Windows Phone is task-centric, not app-centric, with a hub associated with each: people, photos, media
• There’s also a games hub, which ties into Xbox Live
• Third-party applications and games? Wait…

Wait a Minute…What About Third-Party Apps and Games?

Can you wait a month?

Here’s the deal: the announcement at Mobile World Congress was about showing what Windows Phone can do. As for what’s possible on the developer front, it’ll all be announced at the MIX10 Conference, which takes place from March 15th through 17th in Las Vegas.

There will be a dozen sessions at MIX10 for Windows Phone, and they promise to be quite interesting. I’ll be at MIX10, and will blog what I learn from these sessions when they take place.

You can save $200 off the price of MIX10 registration if you register before February 21st, so if you want to get in on the ground floor with Windows Phone and save some money, register now!

What the Tech Press is Saying

Pretty good stuff, actually. Rather than bury you with links to a zillion blog entries filed from Mobile World Congress, I thought I’d pick two of the big tech blogs, Gizmodo and Engadget:

Here’s what Gizmodo has to say about the new Windows Phone:

It’s different. The face of Windows Phone 7 is not a rectangular grid of thumbnail-sized glossy-looking icons, arranged in a pattern of 4×4 or so, like basically every other phone. No, instead, an oversized set of bright, superflat squares fill the screen. The pop of the primary colors and exaggerated flatness produces a kind of cutting-edge crispness that feels both incredibly modern and playful. Text is big, and beautiful. The result is a feat no phone has performed before: Making the iPhone’s interface feel staid.

If you want to know what it feels like, the Zune HD provides a taste: Interface elements that run off the screen; beautiful, oversized text and graphics; flipping, panning, scrolling, zooming from screen to screen; broken hearts. Some people might think it’s gratuitous, but I think it feels natural and just…fun. There’s an incredible sense of joie de vivre that’s just not in any other phone. It makes you wish that this was aesthetic direction all of Microsoft was going in.

Here are Engadget’s impressions, after having some hands-on time with Windows Phone:

The design and layout of 7 Series’ UI (internally called Metro) is really quite original, utilizing what one of the designers (Albert Shum, formerly of Nike) calls an "authentically digital" and "chromeless" experience. What does that mean? Well we can tell you what it doesn’t mean — no shaded icons, no faux 3D or drop shadows, no busy backgrounds (no backgrounds at all), and very little visual flair besides clean typography and transition animations. The whole look is strangely reminiscent of a terminal display (maybe Microsoft is recalling its DOS roots here) — almost Tron-like in its primary color simplicity. To us, it’s rather exciting. This OS looks nothing like anything else on the market, and we think that’s to its advantage. Admittedly, we could stand for a little more information available within single views, and we have yet to see how the phone will handle things like notifications, but the design of the interface is definitely in a class of its own.

(In another article, Engadget simply summed it up with “Microsoft is playing to win”.)

Watch this Space!

We’ll have more announcements about Windows Phone over the next few weeks, so keep an eye on this blog!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Today is all about virtual meetings; I’m spending most of it sitting at the home office with a headset microphone clamped to my head, bouncing from one online meeting to another, magically transporting my presence over great distances. My co-worker John Bristowe is in the same boat and quipped on Twitter: “I feel like I’m playing Live Meeting Portal”.

With that remark, and since it’s a Friday, I can’t help but post this amusing cat photo featuring Portal:

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Last week, I presented Kodu (pronounced “Code-ooh”) to a group of teachers and high school students at Corpus Christi Catholic Secondary School. Kodu is a system created by Microsoft Research for programming videogames without using a traditional programming language; instead, you use a combination of menus and visual programming. It was designed to be a gentle introduction to programming that would appeal to children, but many adults – myself included – have ended up getting drawn into it, spending hours constructing and tweaking game worlds.

Kodu was built using XNA, Microsoft’s framework, toolset and runtime environment for building games for Windows, Xbox 360 and Zune. It was released for the Xbox 360 last summer as an Xbox Indie Game; you can download it for 400 Xbox points — about 5 bucks – or you can try the free trial version (it’s time-limited, but full-featured). If you don’t have an Xbox 360, you can download the Windows version of Kodu for free.

Kodu’s a little tricky to describe – it’s one of those things that’s much easier to show rather than tell. Here are a couple of videos that should give you a bit of Kodu’s flavour. First, here’s IGN’s look at Kodu:

Here’s XNA Roundup’s review of Kodu:

Kodu was designed to be programmed with the Xbox 360 gamepad, which you can use if you’re programming it on the Xbox 360 or a computer (if you’re using a computer, you’ll need either a wired Xbox gamepad plugged into one of its USB ports or a USB adapter for your wireless Xbox gamepad). If you’re using Kodu on a computer, you have the additional option of using the keyboard and mouse.

This is the first of a series of articles on Kodu programming that will appear here from time to time. If you’ve got kids (or know some) who are curious about programming, or if you’re looking to try a completely different kind of programming, get Kodu on your Xbox or PC and give it a try!

In this first installment, I’ll show you how you can build a simple little program that lets you drive an avatar around a small world. In later installments, I’ll show you more game-like elements and the “code” for a game of mine called “Stupid Sparkling Vampire Game”.

Touring Teran00bia

In addition to a programming “language”, Kodu provides you with tools for editing the worlds in which your games take place. I often start with a simple, no-fuss world that I created called “Teran00bia”. It’s a small, flat square world suitable for experimentation. If you have the Windows version of Kodu, you can download Teran00bia here. I can also share the Xbox 360 version, but you have to “friend” me on Xbox Live first – my gamertag is “Accordion Guy”.

Teran00bia is a blank slate, a world with nothing in it. Here’s what it looks like when you load it:

In this exercise, we want to stick a single character – Kodu – into the world and allow the player to drive him around using the controller’s left stick.

To start programming, get into Edit Mode. Press the “Back” button on the gamepad to switch to Edit Mode. Your screen should now look like this:

In Edit Mode, the left thumbstick moves your “cursor” (the purple “donut”) around the world, while the right thumbstick changes your camera angle. You use the left bumper (that’s the button just above the left trigger) to zoom out and the right bumper (the button above the right trigger) to zoom in. The screenshot below shows a zoomed-in view of Teran00bia:

The floating icons near the bottom of the screen make up Kodu’s menu. You use the left and right triggers to scroll through the menu and the A button to select a menu item.

Select the Object Tool from the menu. It’s the second menu item from the left, and its icon is Kodu, who looks sort of like a blue fish with an antenna. When you select the tool, the Kodu menu disappears and you’re now using the object tool, as shown below:

The Object Tool lets you add items to the world or edit any existing ones. There aren’t any items in the world at the moment, so let’s add one. Use the left thumbstick to move the cursor to the spot where you want to place an object, then press the A button. The following menu will appear:

This menu lists the items available to you. Starting at the top and going clockwise, the items in the menu are:

• Kodu (the game system’s mascot, who can be used as either a player character or a non-player character)
• Apple (useful as a health power-up, but nothing stops you from making them poisonous or explosive)
• Bots 1 (a set of characters that can be used either as player characters or non-player characters)
• Bots 2 (more characters that can be used either as players characters or non-player characters)
• Objects (things that characters in the game can interact with, such as rocks, coins, castles and factories)
• Tree (another object that characters in the game can interact with – I have no idea why trees weren’t part of the set of Objects)
• Path (lets you draw paths which Kodu and the other bots can follow)

Use the left thumbstick to select Kodu from the menu, then press the A button to confirm the selection. A Kodu will appear:

You can move Kodu around by pressing the A button to select him, using the left thumbstick to pick a new location and then pressing the A button to drop him there.

What we want to do is program Kodu to move in response to the left thumbstick, as is the convention for most Xbox 360 games. While Kodu is selected, press the Y button. The screen should look like this:

Every programmable object in the Kodu game system has a set of behaviours, each one having two parts:

• When, which describes the event that the object will respond to
• Do, which describes what the object will do in response to the event

The behaviours are numbered starting at 1 and are listed in order of descending priority – that is, behaviour 1 has first priority, followed by behaviour 2, then behaviour 3, and so on.

Your programming “cursor” is the pencil. Move the pencil over the “+” in the “When” part of behaviour 1 and press the A button. You’ll see a menu pop up:

This menu lists the events to which Kodu can react. For now, we’re concerned with making him respond to the left thumbstick, which is part of the gamepad. Select “Gamepad” from the menu with the left thumbstick, then press the A button to confirm the selection. The menu will vanish and you’ll see that a “Gamepad” tile has been added to the “When” part of behaviour 1:

We need to specify which gamepad control Kodu should respond to. Make sure the pencil is over the “+” of the “When” part of behaviour 1, then press the A button. A menu containing various controls on the gamepad will appear:

Use the left thumbstick to select “L stick”, then press the A button. The menu will disappear and you’ll see that the “When” part of behaviour 1 has two tiles: “Gamepad” and “L Stick”:

We’ve just described an event that Kodu should respond to. Now it’s time to describe the response. Move the pencil over the “+” of the “Do” part of behaviour 1 and press the A button. A new menu will appear:

This menu lists responses to events. In this case, we want Kodu to move where the player tells him to move, which is specified by the left thumbstick. Select “Move” from the menu with the left thumbstick, then press A to confirm the selection. The menu will vanish, and you’ll see that a “Move” tile has been added to the “Do” part of behaviour 1:

We’ve now completely defined a single behaviour for Kodu: “When the player moves the left thumbstick, move in that direction”. It’s time to take our (admittedly simple) game for a spin.

Press the Back button to stop programming Kodu. You’ll now be in the Object Tool. Press the Back button again to return to Edit Mode, where Kodu’s main programming menu will become available. Use the left trigger to select Play Mode and press A to confirm the selection.

The program will start with the intro screen. Press A to dismiss the intro screen.

You’ll now be in the game world. Use the left thumbstick to move Kodu around:

Kodu moves, but he’s not so fast. Let’s look at a way to speed him up a little. Press the Back button to exit the program and return to Edit Mode. Use the triggers to select the Object Tool from the menu, then press the A button to confirm the selection.

Move the cursor under Kodu so that he’s selected:

Press the Y button to program Kodu. You’ll be return to his set of behaviours:

Move the pencil over the “+” of the “Do” part of behaviour 1, the press the A button. A menu will appear:

The menu will contain modifiers for the “Move” response. Select “Quickly” from the menu using the left thumbstick, then press the A button. The menu will disappear and you’ll see a “Quickly” tile has been added to the “Do” part of behaviour 1:

To make Kodu move even faster, you can add another “Quickly”:

…in fact, you can add up to three “Quickly” tiles to push Kodu to his maximum speed:

Play Around

I could cover more Kodu features, but you should use it the way it was meant to be used – experiment! Try adding other objects to the world and adding behaviours to them. Take a look at the  programming behind the worlds that were provided with the Kodu game system (be sure to check out “Left 4 Kodu Classic”, a cute Kodu version of the zombie thriller game Left 4 Dead).

Links

• Kodu Game Lab for the Xbox 360 (400 Xbox points)
• Kodu Game Lab for Windows (free-as-in-beer)
• My “Teran00bia” world, handy for experimenting
• The Kodu Blog
• Generic Wars: A Kodu video tutorial showing you how to build a full game
• Planet Kodu has a couple dozen tutorials
• …and of course, keep an eye on this blog!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

For those of you who are fans of Star Trek: The Next Generation, there are some lovely “behind the scenes” shots of the cast and crew on the TrekCore site. I’ve posted a couple of my favourites here.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.