Studio of the Hawk

Studio of the Hawk publishes indie games. Canberk Akay has been its Web & Game Systems Lead since 2025 and built the entire public website along with the secure backend database systems the publishing operation runs on.

The most interesting part is the pitch evaluation system. Indie studios submit game drafts through a portal that processes them automatically rather than dropping them into an inbox — which matters when the alternative is a small team manually triaging every submission that arrives.

Behind that sits a full-stack publisher portal: a custom database admin console with catalogue controls, so the team manages its roster from one place. Steam integration is handled through the Steam WebAPI, covering store launch setups and catalogue optimisation — the unglamorous work that decides whether a release is discoverable on the day it ships.

The commercial layer covers network scaling, influencer integrations and PR campaign coordination, wired into a serverless CRM. The architecture is Next.js with server-side rendering over a Node.js API and PostgreSQL, chosen so the public catalogue pages are fast and indexable rather than locked behind client-side rendering.