Recovery Room

Recovery for patients with substance use disorders (SUD) is a long and difficult path. Treatment, and encouragement to stay committed to recovery is also difficult to find and afford. When there are so few low-cost treatments and coping mechanisms for recovery, the road to recovery can be bleak, especially when the possibility of recovery seems like a pipe dream. We, the researchers, wish to create a virtual space where people suffering from SUD can be reassured of their doubts in themself and in the concept of recovery. The “room” for support that we created is a virtual space that is a visual novel. A visual novel is traditionally a term used in the video game industry, used to describe a video game that is mostly text based with user input in order to change the story. We used a visual novel engine called Renpy in order to make this recovery room. Renpy uses Python as its coding language, and it simplifies text and string display inputs so that the player can simply click on the window to read forward or move backwards in the text. We utilized the button system to be able to add reassuring quotes to each option of distress (categorized by the type of problem). We can categorize this visual novel we created as a “serious game.” Serious games are games meant for educational purposes, or with the intent of being used in the field.

Hello, my name is Taylor Dinh, I’m a part of the George Mason Summer Team Impact Project for 2022. The project that I chose to work on this summer is a serious game in Renpy. I worked on the programming aspect of this project while my partner, McKenna Olsen, worked on the website and literature review. Our project was created in order to try to create personalized digital spaces that can give participants words of encouragement in order to reaffirm their commitment to recovery from substance use disorder.

Now as you can see here, we have our website for our project, and in which you can see there is a brief explanation of our project as well as explanations as to how Renpy works. You can even download our serious game through the builds. We have builds for both Mac and Windows computers. Explanations as to what Renpy is and common misunderstandings as to what each function means and how to fix them. Then, we have our game itself, which you can access through the Renpy launcher. All you have to do is select your game, and then hit “launch project;” however, if you were to download the game through the builds tab, you do not need Renpy in order to access this.

So, what is our project? Well, we used Renpy, a visual novel engine that runs using Python, in order to create a program that we call The Recovery Room. This room has a user interface that allows the participant to interact, as you can see here you can press the start button and click to move forward and you can receive encouragement based on what problem you are facing that day. The long-term possibilities for this project are that professionals in the industry can learn to create their own recovery rooms for their patients, together with their patients in order to create a therapeutic and personalized app that runs with minimal coding that way the patient can access it on their phone if they need it or if they need a reminder of their goal of recovery. The audio, the images and the text can all be altered to better suit the patient’s needs.

Thank you for listening to my presentation on our recovery room and listening to our hard work this summer.