The Plug-in Media team has been a key supplier of content to the Sky Kids app, producing some super fun game engines delivering digital art, quiz, and coding actvitiies for kids to the mobile app and Sky Q set-top boxes. 

Buddy Code was our response to a brief from Sky Kids to develop a game that would teach basic coding skills.   Trying to create the right balance between learning and play was the biggest challenge of the project, especially when dealing with a subject that is already perceived to be quite challenging. We were determined to deliver an educational game appropriate for the younger demographic without it feeling like education.

Kids often learn best from interactive play - in a similar way to exercise stimulating the body, interactive media provides an opportunity to stimulate our brains. Through this touch-screen gaming experience, children not only learn the basic concepts of computational logic, such as debugging and structuring algorithms, but also engage with these challenging concepts in a way that is both playful and visually stimulating.

Players must design their own code sequence, by choosing different commands in order to assemble a route for Buddy to follow to reach his lost dog. Via a drag-and-drop interaction, each command is taken from a code library running horizontally across the bottom of the screen, and then placed into a sequence line. After pressing play on the sequence line, Buddy follows the player's commands and is animated to move tile-by-tile around the grid-based maze.

Players can press play at any time to debug their code and reassemble commands through trial and error in order to avoid obstacle tiles. Along the way, players can also collect items from special pick-up tiles, bounce on the trampoline tiles and smash through rock tiles.

Each level transports the player through different fun-themed mazes: street, underwater, jungle and lost world, with 23 levels in total, each increasing with complexity. Players can earn star rewards along the way - the more optimised routes you take, the more stars you win!

Sky have told us that the game has been hugely popular with the younger girl demographic. In light of recent women in coding movements that aim to empower women in STEM subjects, it is both rewarding and exciting to see such positive user feedback from our next generation of girls.

The game was developed in HTML5 and we're delighted that Buddy Code can be accessed through the Sky Kids app on any touch-screen iOS or Android device.