I'll admit, after watching the trailer for Phono Alliance from independant developer Soft Hope, I wasn't quite sure what I watched.  The game is described as a Patapon meets Super Mario Bros. style game.  That is, an action platformer with music and rhythym based elements.

Being developed for the Xbox 360 on the Indie Games channel, Phono Alliance allows two players to team up through a slick hand drawn world and conquer enemies like teddie bears, giant birds, and crazy pirates that turn into treasures chests.  You'll attack using your drum and notes with one of two characters - The Rocker or The Rapper.  

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Brett Hall, the creator of Xbox Live Community Game Joint Strike Force sat down with Examiner LA's Erik Johnson in a recent interview about the game, its development, and certification and publishing via the XNA creation system.

Nearly halfway into the interview, Brett was asked to describe the co-op aspects of his game:

GNE: Hands down, the best component of the game was the co-op, it added that extra layer of strategy to the game and made it engaging, what are your general thoughts on the co-op and did you find it to have any affect on how you developed the game?  

BH: Co-op is definitely the way to play the game. Such a small feature as recording enemies destroyed and keeping track of that from one level to the next adds a competitive aspect to it. My brother-in-law actually beat me in overall kill count in his first play through the game! I don't change the difficulty in two player mode so it makes it possible to completely destroy every enemy.

We've been seeing a TON of co-op support among independent game studios and community games, and it seems to garner their titles a lot of positive attention and -- more importantly -- good sales numbers.

The interview goes on to mention a couple of projects that Brett has in the works for the future. We wish him good luck and hope that he continues to support co-op. In the meantime, give the full article a read for an interesting view into the process of creating an indie game.

Source: Link

Microsoft launched the Community Games channel for the Xbox 360 in November. In three months, developers have released more than 180 games for the service, with over 30 featuring co-op play. It’s been hard to keep track of all the releases even for those of us highly interested in them. But in the last couple of weeks we played through all of the demos available and picked five to spend some quality time with.

I think it's human nature to want to try to create.  Whether you are creating your own art, literature, movies or games; humans have a switch somewhere in that brain of theirs that makes them creative.  Every gamer at some point as said - "I want to make a game."

For some the learning curve is simply too much for a programming language, or even some of the out of the box solutions like that of GarageGames or even XNA.  Microsoft's next entry into this world is called Kodu (formerly Boku) and it's a visual programming langauge.  

Kodu was demonstrated live last night during Microsoft's CES keynote, and it was demo'd by a 12 year old girl named Sparrow (Fable 2 reference perhaps?).  From the looks of things actions are broken down into logic blocks which can be stacked into full routines, think LEGO Mindstorm.  It's tough to say how open ended Kodu is, but we do know there's multiplayer support - so co-op is possible.  

Kodu launches this spring on Xbox Live Community Games Channel.  So what do you say, will you try your hand at creating a co-op game?

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