Kinect indie dev tools â??closeâ??

Microsoft Game Studios corporate vice president Phil Spencer has told IGN that the firm is close to offering Kinect dev tools to indie developers.

"It was one of the things that was exciting to me seeing the experiences at TGS that were a little bit out there,” Spencer said.

“You start to feel like you can have people doing really different things, and the platform documentation is there to the point where people can go create a flaming baseball game while somebody else is doing a river rafting game."

Spencer described the intentions of Microsoft as seeking to develop a wide base of support for the Kinect platform.

“Getting a broad set of developers supporting our platform at all levels is important to our success. It’s in our plan to make that happen,” he added.

“We’re working with some universities now, we did a Kinect course down at USC last spring where we had students in their computer science and film schools build some stuff. It was great to see the stuff they came up with. We’re going to continue to push there."

I think we’re close… when you can simply drop the things in and go away and it works perfectly, then you’re ready. And I think we’re close given we’re so close to shipping."