Budge World was my main project at Budge Studios from 2017 to 2019. I was on the project for a little over two years, at which point it was considered complete and I was moved to a different team. Budge World is a one-stop subscription app featuring over 100 mini-games from a large number of popular brands, letting kids learn and have fun with all of their favourite characters in one place. I was one of the Unity developers on the project, creating many of the mini-games from the ground up, the activity selection menu, several different versions of the in-app store, and much of the activity payoff flow. Budge World was released before I joined the project, so the vast majority of my work was updates, new features, and bug-fixing for a live app. I got to work extensively in the framework of the app, re-writing a fair amount of the underlying code base as the project evolved over the course of the two years. I got quite familiar with a lot of the tools and libraries that Budge Studios uses, and it was great to work as part of the same team for an extended period of time.
Things learned from Budge World:
Budge World was the first time I had the chance to work on updating a live subscription app. Changing existing code, adding new stuff and making sure everything still works when updating a user’s existing installation was an interesting challenge.
A lot of optimization had to be done to make sure the game could still run smoothly on older mobile devices. I got to put some of my optimization skills to the test, especially when putting together the activity selection menu (so many tiles!).
Seeing kids playing our games during play-tests was a lot of fun! It was really cool to see what kinds of things they pay attention to compared to how we interacted with the app ourselves.
Alexi Bay 