Code of Everand: the Department for Transport's road safety game

Code of Everand is a free browser-based multiplayer game about road safety, commissioned by the UK government's Department for Transport (DfT) and made by the studio Area/Code. The department launched it on November 19, 2009, for children moving from primary to secondary school. The aim was to cut child pedestrian casualties and deaths in that age group by letting young people practice good road safety habits in a medium they already enjoy, and to reward repeat play so the habits stick in real life. The DfT described the audience as 9 to 13 year olds.

The DfT chose a PC game after its own research found it needed new media channels to reach this audience. Area/Code, the studio behind Discovery Channel's Sharkrunners and Drop7 for iPhone, spent more than two years on the project, a large and ambitious job that also involved the complexities of working for a government body. Frank Lantz and Kevin Slavin were the principals and designers. The project went through several incarnations and was twice on the brink of cancellation.

Kevin Cancienne, Area/Code's director of game development, gave a session on it at the 2010 Game Developers Conference Serious Games Summit. It was titled "Code of Everand: Designing The Serious Casual MMO". The session promised three lessons: turning a seemingly mundane subject into compelling gameplay, talking about gameplay with a government client, and using the constraints of a serious purpose for all they are worth.

Players are pathfinders in a land crossed by spirit channels, lines of hazardous creatures that they dispel with magic. Exploration uses a top-down view. Turn-based battles switch to a first-person view and make the player look around the scene for threats. Players also earn Concentration Points to help defeat enemies, a nod to paying attention when crossing.

Beneath that sits a full role-playing game. There are dozens of attacks, each stronger against certain enemy types, and quests from non-player characters that pay cash for clothing, armor and weapons. Progress saves automatically, so a child can return from any computer with a browser. Players talk to one another through a set list of phrases, and some quests can only be finished together.

The game's own website address, codeofeverand.com, now shows a domain registrar's placeholder page and no game. Area/Code's studio address, areacodeinc.com, no longer shows a studio website, and an address on it forwards to a domain-listing site.

No official page offering Code of Everand is confirmed, so the games directory lists its status as not confirmed.