Digital Citizenship Project: 3D Educational Game We Developed for the Council of Europe and National Ministiry of National Education

Most education games fail before a single line of code is written.

Not because of bad engineering. Not because of weak art direction. They fail because someone handed a developer a curriculum PDF and said “make it fun.” That gap between what needs to be taught and what’s actually worth playing is where most serious game projects quietly fall apart.

This is the story of how we approached that gap differently.

The Project

You can check the project on EBA platform by clicking the image.

The Digital Citizenship Project was commissioned by Turkey’s Ministry of National Education (MEB) and funded by the Council of Europe. The goal: create a browser-based 3D education game that teaches middle school students: grades 5 through 8, how to navigate the digital world responsibly.

The topics covered were not light ones. Cyberbullying. Online privacy and data security. Disinformation and media literacy. Screen time and digital wellbeing. Four pillars, one game, an age range spanning roughly 10 to 14 years old.

Our job was to take that brief and turn it into something kids would actually want to play.

Before Any Design Work: Three Days of Council

We didn’t start with wireframes. We didn’t start with an engine. We started with a three-day workshop: a curriculum council that brought together teachers from the Ministry of National Education alongside a pedagogical specialist from our own team.

Those three days were spent asking questions that software alone can’t answer. What does a 12-year-old already understand about privacy and what do they misunderstand? How do you present cyberbullying in a way that’s honest without being traumatizing? What learning outcome do you actually want at the end of each session? Which concepts need to land emotionally, not just informationally

Meet DijiVat

The protagonist is a robot named DijiVat: a contraction of dijital vatandaş, Turkish for “digital citizen.”

The world DijiVat inhabits is a city in crisis. Misinformation is spreading. Personal data is being exploited. People are being harassed online and no one knows what’s real anymore. The city is deteriorating, and DijiVat has to fix it. One mission at a time.

This narrative framing was a deliberate design decision. “Digital citizenship” is an abstract idea. “Save the city” is not. Every quest in the game maps to a specific learning objective, but the player experiences it as a mission with stakes, characters, and consequences. When DijiVat makes the right call on a privacy decision or correctly identifies a piece of disinformation, something in the world visibly improves.

That feedback loop; action, consequence, progress is what separates a serious game from a quiz with graphics.

Technical Build: Unity and WebGL

Platform accessibility was a hard constraint from the start. The game needed to run in a browser, on standard school computers, without any installation. That requirement pointed directly to Unity with WebGL export, which became our core technical stack.

Development ran for six to twelve months, from concept to playable final release. The architecture we built around Unity included several interconnected systems:

• Quest and Mission System. Each digital citizenship theme has its own mission chain. Students can’t skip ahead — content is sequenced intentionally, and progression through one topic unlocks the next. This prevents the surface-level engagement that plagues a lot of education software.
• NPC and Dialogue System. Characters in the city drive the narrative and deliver information through conversation rather than instruction. The distinction matters. When a character tells you something because it’s relevant to their situation, you retain it differently than when a tooltip tells you something because a curriculum said to include it.
• Integrated Quiz Mechanics. Multiple-choice questions are embedded inside the mission flow — not isolated on a “quiz screen.” Wrong answers don’t trigger a failure state; they trigger a branch that provides context and lets the player try again. Learning, not performance, is the metric.
• Score, Badge, and Reward System. Progress needs to be visible. Students can see which topics they’ve completed and what they’ve earned, which sustains motivation across sessions and creates organic engagement within classroom settings.
• Cinematics and Story Sequences. Certain moments in the game — particularly around cyberbullying and disinformation — are handled with short cinematic sequences rather than gameplay. This was a conscious choice to give heavier topics the weight they deserve, without making them feel like pop-up warnings.

The Real Challenge in Serious Game Development

Building a fun game is hard. Building a fun game that also teaches something is a different problem entirely and the two goals are in constant tension.

Lean too far toward education, and you get a textbook with animations. Lean too far toward entertainment, and the learning objectives get hollowed out. Most serious games that disappoint do so because no one managed that tension explicitly. It gets resolved by default, usually in favor of whichever team had more political weight in the room.

The three-day workshop at the beginning of this project existed precisely to prevent that. Having teachers and a pedagogical specialist at the table from day one meant that trade-offs got surfaced early, before they were baked into the product. When we later made design decisions that affected educational clarity, we had a framework to evaluate them against not just a gut feeling.

That process isn’t standard. It probably should be.

Why This Matters for the Education Game Market

Digital citizenship is becoming a curriculum requirement in more and more countries. The Council of Europe has been active in promoting it across member states, and this project is one example of what structured, funded implementation can look like at a national scale.

Game-based learning more broadly is past the point of needing justification. The research is there. The methodology is established. What’s still genuinely hard is execution specifically, execution that holds both the pedagogical and the player experience to a high standard simultaneously.

For organizations looking to commission serious games, the practical implication is this: the quality of the pre-production process determines most of the outcome. A developer who only gets involved after the content design is finalized will build you something technically competent that may still miss the mark. A development partner who can participate in shaping the learning architecture before a single asset is created is working from a fundamentally different position.

That’s the position we take on projects like this one.