The Long Journey of Kozomo: From 2016 to Release

Kozomo has been with me for a long time, in one form or another. What finally became The Smoldering Ember started back in 2021 as a small project I thought I could finish in just a few months. I had a plan: design it in May, start development in June, and release it by the end of the year. Instead, it turned into a four-year journey full of pauses, changes, burnout, and eventual release in April 2025. It wasn’t smooth, it wasn’t glamorous, and honestly, it wasn’t very profitable—but it was real, and it stayed with me through some of the hardest years of my life.

This is the story of how Kozomo came to be.

2021 – The Beginning

In May 2021, I began designing the game which didn't have the name The Smoldering Ember. By June, real development had started. My goal was simple: finish the game by September and release it around November. My main intention was to finish and release a game before I lost the chance. It was my last year of high school, and I wanted to complete something meaningful before being swept up in exams and university preparations. I was trying to develop my own games since i was twelve but in the end all of those games would be put aside. This had to be done before I was forced to study, which I didn't want to do or care about anyway.

I chose a main character which was designed five or six years before the development of this game. And then i decided to make a puzzle-platformer, because it seemed to me the easiest genre to generate content for it. I wouldn't have to worry about polishing the feel of an action game, balancing a strategy game, writing hundreds of pages of story for a role-playing game, or designing vast worlds. Just design a couple mechanics, and design levels using innovative interactions between those mechanics.

Fortunately, things moved fast at first. By September, I had finished almost all the mechanics and most of the art. But then it reality hit: the school started, and I had to focus on preparing for university exams. Progress slowed to a crawl. For 4 months, all i did was some little art, sounds and music. Also i did some planning on story what to happen when. The places, key-characters and the ending to the story already was decided all the way back in 2016-2017.

2022 – Almost Done, But Not Quite

By April 2022, the game was technically complete in terms of mechanics. The only things left were level design and story. At the time, I thought it was just a matter of a few more months. But there was the university exams just two months away. So I decided to take a short break, planning to resume the development in October and release the game in summer 2023. But that never happened.

2022–2023 – Losing Momentum

I had scored higher than I expected on my university exams and entered a major I wasn’t interested in, thinking I could handle it anyway. I chose AI and Data not because I cared about it, but because it was close enough to computer engineering, which mattered slightly more to me. I had always seen university as nothing more than an inefficient but necessary timespan, so my motivation was low from the start.

Also puzzle-platformers were one of the least profitable genres in indie games, and even though I technically had more free time than in high school, this made me question whether it was worth pouring energy into something with such uncertain returns.

During this time, I lost all interest in Kozomo, in game development in general, and in life itself. I didn’t quite understand why I felt this way, since externally everything was fine—a good university, no financial difficulties, no health problems, no problems to be seen—but internally I was exhausted and empty. Feeling discontented kept me away from others. This led to more social isolation, which in turn deepened my discontent—a vicious cycle. My mental state, which was never very stable, worsened significantly, and development completely stalled. Loneliness, social difficulties, and dissatisfaction with life made it impossible to focus on the game, and for a long period, nothing progressed.

2024 – Finding My Way Back

Things shifted in mid-2024. I decided to attend a physical game jam, mostly to get my mind off things. To my surprise, it reignited something in me. I decided to tinker again with game development. And I decided to continue developing Kozomo, which i thought i wouldn't get back to it, because it was near completion and i thought it would be better for me to achieve something as soon as possible before my mental state gone worse.

Between July and September 2024, I completed two-thirds of the level design. Then I shifted to story writing for a demo—a task far harder than anticipated due to my unfamiliarity with narrative composition. Writing the narrative took far longer than I planned, so eventually by December 2024 I decided to cancel the last third of the game entirely, just to keep the story manageable. So there were no need to design new levels either. All i had to do was finishing the story.

2025 – Release at Last

The demo was released during Steam’s Next Fest. I didn't have much expectations for Next Fest because before it, the game had around a hundred wishlists, and by the end of the event, that number doubled to two hundred.

I pushed through the final stretch of development and finally finished the game in April. On April 25, 2025, after years of delays and doubts, Kozomo: The Smoldering Ember was released.

Aftermath

Now I'm writing this, in September 2025, after the development of Assist Features update, and possibly the last update, the financial reality is clear. The game only made $33, which i got none from because it is still under the threshold and it didn't cover Steam’s submission fee too.

Well it’s a bit disappointing, of course. But I didn't develop this game with a financial goal anyway. And also, Kozomo wasn’t just a product. It was something that stayed with me through high school, university, burnout, and recovery. Even if it didn’t succeed financially, it still exists—it’s out there, finished, in a world where so many indie projects never get completed at all.

Cut Content

As I said before, this game only covers the two-third of the original plan. Like most long projects, Kozomo went through a lot of changes along the way. Not everything I planned made it into the final game. Some ideas were cut for scope, others because I wasn’t satisfied with how they turned out, and some simply because I needed to finish. Here are a few of the bigger pieces that didn’t survive to release:

Scrapped Mechanics
Several mechanics never made it past the design stage. These included:

• Water Pipes – could extinguish fire, triggered by buttons or steam engines.

• Ice Blocks – frictionless blocks that sometimes trapped frozen enemies inside, and could be created by Water Pipes in colder areas.

• Snowballs – objects that fell from above and grew larger as they rolled.

• Icicles – spikes that dropped from the ceiling to hit the player.

These were originally intended for two planned areas, The Mountain and The Hillside. In the final version, The Hillside was cut entirely, and The Mountain ended up without those mechanics.

Alternate Perspectives
At one point, I considered including a short playable section as one of the King’s troops, searching for Kozomo. It was meant to show the other side of the story, but it was dropped early on. The Troop was going to have a crossbow and this section was going to be after the first Mysterious Wizard Chase. Similarly, I had designed walking variants of the Archer and Knight enemies, to have more challenging enemies for this section, but decided against adding them, to keep the focus tightly on puzzle mechanics.

Conversations with Friends
There were also supposed to be more story sections with Kozomo and his four friends, spread across multiple chapters. But I quickly realized I wasn’t good at writing conversations—both in the game and in real life—so I reduced it to just one scene.

The Original Ending
The ending was once planned to be bigger. After Kozomo accidentally sets the Palace on fire, there was going to be a final platforming sequence where he escapes the burning building. That would have been followed by a dramatic encounter with his father.

The King, breaking his oath, would finally draw his sword and try to punish Kozomo. It wouldn’t have been a typical boss fight—the idea was that the player should defend themselves without killing the King. In the end, the King would be consumed by the flames, while Kozomo barely escapes.

This entire sequence was cut simply because I was rushing to finish the game. By that point, I doubted most players would ever reach the ending anyway, and cutting it allowed me to actually release the game instead of stalling out again.

The Future

I don’t have plans for any major updates to Kozomo. If players find bugs, I’ll fix them — small patches and stability improvements only — but I’m not planning new content or expansions.

Kozomo was an exception, not the start of a solo-dev career. I finished it because it had become an obsession that I needed to see through, not because I expected it to become a living project or a reliable income source. I don’t have another obsession like that waiting in the wings, so I won’t be continuing solo game development in the same, all-consuming way.

That said, I’m not quitting game-related work entirely. I still have mental health issues to manage, and that will shape how I approach creative projects going forward. I don’t intend to make future projects with the “I will release this game” pressure—rather, I’ll experiment, tinker, and try new ideas at a pace that doesn’t break me. If something I make again reaches a point I’m proud of, I’ll share it. If not, that’s okay too.

I also discovered that the part of development I enjoyed most was programming. My younger self always doubted how I could ever “just do one thing” if I ended up working in a group, but now I see that trying to handle everything—art, story, design, and code—was far more difficult and less rewarding. Programming was the one part that consistently felt worthwhile.

I don’t have a grand plan for my life right now. My immediate, practical goal is to get through university with the least damage possible and to build a steadier emotional footing for myself. Stability matters more than ambition for me at the moment, and I need to give myself time and space to recover, I hope it does not take long.

If my mental health improves and I find a way to do creative work that doesn’t exhaust me, I’d like to keep making things — whether that’s another small game, a development tool, or something in graphics programming. What I make next will depend on how I’m doing, not on any external expectations.

If I do finish something again in the future, I hope you’ll see it. For now, I’m stepping back from large promises and focusing on small, manageable steps: stabilizing, exploring, and letting creativity return on its own terms.

Before the Game: Kozomo as a Character

I started this game in 2021, yes, but actually the creation of our dude, Kozomo, goes way back before the game itself. Kozomo was a character my middle-school friend and I came up with for an imaginary universe we created together. It was 2015 or 2016, i don't quite remember the date. He was already drawing fantastic creatures by time to time but I mentioned the idea of writing lore for the characters and creating a universe out of those. Kozomo was one of those characters.

At first Kozomo was just a mysterious prince with fire powers. A year later, his story evolved into throne struggle. It was a story about two sons of a king, one of them is clever, kind and diplomatic, the other one, Kozomo, is the naughty and violent one. At the end of the story, Kozomo would kill his brother with fire magic, a power which his kind didn't knew before, that would then ignite the whole kingdom. Kozomo would lose his mind, glazing over the burning kingdom, hearing the cries of his own people. No one would come out alive from that fire.

That story stick to me for a very long time. It actually turned into a huge obsession. Every time i would think about Kozomo. I would draw Kozomo, for every occasion. I tried various ways to tell his story. Tried to make an animation, write a long story, started development of at least four different video games but all of them eventually got discarded.

But when I started design process of The Smoldering Ember, I decided to change most of the story. First of all I wasn't sure about, how people would feel about playing as the genocider. And second, relationship between multiple people seemed like a much work. So changed the story and turned it into a lone journey. But kept the ending anyway.

During the development in 2021, i often wondered what would be the motive for Kozomo to not be a normal heir to the throne but a unhinged prince who would eventually burn the kingdom down. After deciding to continue to the development in 2024, I changed the story one last time to something i can totally relate to. Making Kozomo someone who is suffering from quarter-life crisis and severe dysthmia. Then at the end, he would burn the kingdom by accident due to a meltdown. Also this would allow me to express my feelings that i still quite address why. "Why would a person be depressed if they don't have any loss or deficiency?". Although shifting the story this way was the right decision, I still wish I could have conveyed the theme more powerfully. But that's all i could do so i hope it is good enough.

Closing Thoughts

When I started designing Kozomo back in 2021, I thought it would be a quick project, maybe even a small launch before I moved on to other things. Instead, it became a long, winding journey that stretched across several, let's say far more unpredictable than I imagined, years of my life.

Would I call it a success? Not financially. But as a personal milestone, absolutely. Kozomo was never really about money—it was about seeing something through to the end, no matter how long it took. And for that reason, I’m glad I didn’t abandon it completely.