Boozy Gears

2023
PC
Research project - Made in Unity

In the summer of 2023, I went to Canada on a scholarship as an undergraduate visiting researcher. Boozy Gears is a game/research project that I created during the three months of my internship at the Persuasive Computing Lab, Dalhousie University.

The game was designed as a persuasive game - "a video game designed to influence player attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors regarding real-world social, political, or educational issues", to discourage people from drunk driving. I had to study persuasive techniques in clinical studies as well as frameworks for designing persuasive mechanics, and create the game around that.

Boozy Gears is played as a first-person driving simulator, which has multiple stories told in a visual novel format. The protagonist is placed in real-life social conditions where they are encouraged to drink, and based on the player's choice (how much they drank), the intoxication takes effect, disrupting the player's driving ability. Each story has multiple endings, depending on whether the player reaches their destination and in what condition.

A post-development study of the game was carried out with 31 participants, and the results were published as a research paper in the 2025 IEEE Conference on Serious Games and Applications for Health (SeGAH). You can read the paper here.