SoulDive — Turning Meditation Into a Game | Botonglee

Last year, during a long-term program at Korea's New Content Academy (NCA), I made an interactive game. I wanted to turn meditation from something static — sitting still, eyes closed — into something you move through and choose your way across, so that facing yourself became an active experience rather than a passive one.

The project is officially registered in the archive of the Korea Creative Content Agency (KOCCA). See the original listing →

Why I started this

Most meditation content is static. You sit, close your eyes, and follow a voice. For a lot of people dealing with real anxiety or depression, that format itself can be a barrier before the content even begins.

So I reinterpreted meditation — not as emptying, but as active practice: exploring yourself through movement. Combine that with the narrative and choice that games are built on, and meditation becomes something easier and more engaging to actually experience, rather than something you're told to believe works.

What the story is

It's a narrative game about a protagonist worn down by everyday life who explores an unconscious inner world through meditation, confronting the self and their emotions, and gradually finding both direction and a clearer understanding of who they are.

A bedroom lit by a bedside lamp, a phone resting on the nightstand

Each chapter deals with one real emotional problem people actually carry — the compulsion toward perfection, anxiety, loneliness. You move through spaces tied to each emotion and experience them directly, which is what turns the moment into genuine self-reflection instead of a cutscene you watch happen.

A hooded figure standing among a crowd inside a subway car

That feeling of being surrounded by people and still alone. Scenes like this open each chapter, right before the game shifts into the meditative world.

A figure seen from behind, sitting at a desk facing a monitor, two desk lamps lit in the dark

At the end, the player has a conversation with an AI character called "Soul," arriving at a moment of self-awareness. The game closes with a message of understanding yourself more deeply — not a lecture, but something you arrive at through the conversation itself.

Crossing into the inner world

If the real-world scenes are muted and restrained, the unconscious world is a completely different register.

A purple canyon with beams of light pouring down and glowing orbs floating above it

A single glowing figure standing at the edge of a dark canyon

The same character reads as nearly colorless in the real world and as light itself in the inner world. That contrast was intentional — the point is that even when someone looks worn out on the outside, there is still light inside.

How it was built, and who built it

SoulDive is an interactive game built on Unreal Engine. The team was called EXGD Shintam Crew.

| Role | Name | Notes |

|---|---|---|

| Systems design / PO / level design | Byeongmin Kang | |

| Content design / PM / narrative | Sujin Lee (me) | Overall system design, Unreal Blueprint implementation, feature prioritization, and development flow management |

The project was produced through the New Content Academy (NCA) education program and is formally registered in KOCCA's outcomes archive.

Looking back on it now

There was one question I kept coming back to while making this: how do you get more people to experience meditation in their body, directly, instead of just being told about it?

WECOSMO, the platform I'm building now, starts from the same question. The format has changed — from a game to an actual meditation platform — but the direction hasn't: moving past static meditation toward something people genuinely experience.

SoulDive was the first time I gave that direction a concrete shape.