While it was still in development, the game In the SEOM with BTS went by the working title GFH, short for Game for Healing, a neologism for relaxation and release. Producer Oh Won Seok with HYBE IM KORE Studio, the group who oversees development on the game, explained how it’s evident from the working title that they were taking a “direction of creating a relaxing game” even before development was in full swing, noting as well the reason why the idea of restorative gameplay played such a major role when creating a game with BTS. “No doubt the members of BTS put in a monumental amount of effort in order to reach the top—more than we could possibly imagine. We wanted to gift them with a game world where they could relax and find comfort.”

Development kicked off with “asking the members what kinds of things they usually like to do and the things they want to have the most,” Oh said, adding they “held around 10 meetings in person with the members over the course of around a year while developing the game and continuously sent ideas back and forth, too.” Oh said they felt strongly that the characters in In the SEOM with BTS should be designed from scratch with the BTS members. “At the first meeting, we showed the members cut-outs of characters we worked on with various proportions and sample videos we made of how they looked dancing. Of all the candidates, they were most drawn to the cute little SD [super-deformed]-style characters. I remember how amazed j-hope was, laughing his head off as he was watching them move around in the video, saying, How can they move like that when their arms and legs are so short? The decision to go with the characters with their current proportions was largely influenced by the members’ strong preference for the SD character dance video.” The team exchanged ideas with the BTS members from the sketch stage to create a basic outline and naturally the final design incorporates a wealth of comments from the members as well. “V had a lot to say about the hairstyle, RM thought the facial expressions should be funnier and Jung Kook and Jimin had detailed suggestions for the eyes and faces, all of which was a lot of help when designing the characters. It was actually the other members who asked that Jin’s lips be fuller, so we modified them, which made it cuter. j-hope and SUGA were immediately satisfied with the early versions so they look pretty much the same.” Oh said reflecting all these details “wasn’t easy, of course, but we were actually more driven by all their comments,” adding that it was a continuous process of meeting with the BTS members and repeatedly thinking about how to work the suggestions into the game until the next month’s meeting.

Trading ideas with each other allowed for more exciting final product, too. The idea to refer to the in-game quest function as “today’s missions” was Jin’s. “Typically it’ll be called something like a mission system or quests,” Oh said. “Just as we were thinking of naming it something that would be easier to understand, Jin suddenly suggested we call it ‘today’s missions.’ When we heard that, it was a perfect fit for the concept behind the storyline, which progresses day by day.” Oh said that building on the members’ ideas also brought about new functions that weren’t originally there. “When we first showed the members a prototype in a meeting, the only way you could move the characters was by dragging them. But then they very determinedly started stacking the characters on top of each other one by one. They said it would be fun if you could build a tower out of all seven characters, so we decided to try it out right away, and we created a function to create a human tower and brought it with us into the next meeting. The members absolutely loved it and users do it all the time, too, and share screenshots. We’re really proud of that.” Oh also noted how “there’s a feature where you tap twice on the whale-shaped blast pop-up and it matches up with the power-up blocks, which isn’t a feature you see in other games,” and that they ended up making another feature based on something “RM said sort of suddenly: Wouldn’t it be even more fun if we made it so there’s a small chance that it gets combined with a rocket or a bomb?” Oh explained that exchanging ideas with the BTS members was the most important part of the process because “ideas usually get progressively narrower while developing. Since we chose to make a game that required a lot of input from the members, we wanted to hear plenty of their ideas. It was new to us, too, but I think we were able to make a better game as a result of being open to fresh, outside-the-box ideas and developing it based on those.”

Kang said they “want In the SEOM with BTS to function like a kind of time machine,” one where users “can feel proud for being a BTS fan and look back on what the group did in the past and how fun it was.” She said the goal was for the game to become something that lets ARMY “feel a sense of the nostalgia they cherish as a fan of BTS and a way to look back on their shared past” as they play, adding that they “tried to use direct quotes word for word from famous video clips so ARMY would automatically hear them in BTS’s voices.” If you look at the scene where the character version of Jin says to Jimin, “Cola! I’ll have just one cup!” for example, it quickly calls to mind the way the two of them joke around with each other in the 2018 Weverse Live clip “BTS Live: Long Time No See! 😗.” It’s moments like these, where In the SEOM reconstructs BTS and ARMY’s shared memories, that the game lets players relive those happy times they had together. Certain aspects of the game, like how Jin’s pet KORE—who had “appeared in the music video for ‘IDOL’ as a 2D drawing before but in 3D in In the SEOM with BTS”—moves happily about the ocean, or how Jung Kook runs around the island with his pet Gureum, “can’t be seen anywhere else but In the SEOM with BTS, so they feel more special,” Kang explained. Gureum only made it to the game after careful consideration(historical examination) and “based on Jung Kook’s views that ‘it would be nice if he were my pet in the game’ even though he already crossed that rainbow bridge in the sky.” The game also contains an event where players can decorate a special campground area, which is based on the in-game story that Jung Kook takes all the other members on a camping trip following the real-life events of his “CAMPING VLOG” on BTS VLOG. It’s details like this that make the In the SEOM experience so special and are essentially little presents for ARMY. The whole thing is “a game dedicated to ARMY,” Jung, from the art team, said. “We're trying to give ARMY the content that they would be the most interested in and do it in the most interesting way possible.”

Early on, when SUGA was asked what he wanted the fans to think of the game as, he replied, “An island. Yes, this is an island. A small island that we made.” As he said, In the SEOM with BTS is an island that BTS and ARMY have made together. In the SEOM is a virtual playground where BTS and ARMY can play together as well as a layered archive of over nine years of heartwarming memories and thus a way for ARMY to relive them. Kang touched upon the reason why the game had to aim for the idea of relaxation from the earliest days, when it was still called Project GFH: “It’s a game, but at the same time, it’s another one of BTS’s worlds,” Kang said, so “it was important to show how cute, cool and delightful BTS are even within the world of In the SEOM with BTS.” That also explains why the game continues to focus on staying connected to what BTS is doing in the real world. The game receives updates every time one of the BTS members has a birthday or some big news so that it can keep up with changes in the real world. And that’s how there came to be a peaceful little island where BTS and ARMY could be together—the same island where “we will meet again … after spending eternity together.”