Releasing Axirune Beyond My Own Website

By the beginning of August, most of the development work on Axirune was already behind me. The game had gone through the usual final round of testing, the puzzles had been replayed more times than I could count and I was finally at the point where continuing to adjust things simply because I could was no longer helping. The next challenge was very different from building the game itself. I now had to work out how people were actually going to play it, where developers would be able to find the complete source project and how I was going to show the game to anyone who had never heard of HK Lab Studio before.

Until that point, most of Axirune had existed inside a development environment that I controlled. I knew how to open the project, where every file lived and what each part of the game was supposed to do. That obviously isn't how somebody else experiences a finished product. A player needs to be able to click something and start playing without knowing anything about the project behind it, while a developer buying the source code needs a completely different experience. They need to understand what they are getting, what version of the project they are downloading and whether the source package is something they can realistically open and work with.That became the focus of August.

Getting Axirune Playable on itch.io

One of the first things I wanted was a version of Axirune that people could actually try without having to install anything. I had already spent months writing descriptions and preparing screenshots, but there is only so much those can explain about a puzzle game. You can tell someone that the game is built around directional movement, planning and increasingly difficult stages, but it makes far more sense once they actually play a level.That was why itch.io became an important part of the release.Instead of treating itch.io purely as another download store, I wanted to use it as a place where someone could discover Axirune and immediately try the game in the browser. There is much less friction in clicking a Play button than downloading an installer for a game you have never heard of, and for a small independent project that seemed particularly important.

Preparing the playable version also forced me to think about the game from the player's side again. During development I was used to running Axirune on my own system, so I already knew what I was supposed to do and what every screen meant. A browser build is different because somebody can arrive with no context at all. I had to make sure the experience worked properly outside my own development setup and that the game could stand on its own without me explaining anything.There were also the practical details that only become important when something is about to go public. The correct build had to be uploaded, the page needed screenshots and descriptions that accurately represented the game and I had to make sure the browser version behaved the way I expected once it was running through the platform rather than directly from my computer.

It is one of those jobs that sounds simple when you summarise it afterwards. “Put the demo on itch.io” sounds like something that should take a few minutes. In reality there are plenty of small things around that sentence, and each one matters because it becomes part of somebody's first impression of the game.Once it was working, though, I finally had something I had wanted for a while: a link I could give someone and say, “You can play Axirune here.”

That made the project feel much more real.

Preparing the Source Code for Codester

The other side of the release was aimed at developers rather than players.Axirune was never intended to exist only as a finished puzzle game. One of the reasons I wanted to build it as a complete project was so that the Godot source could eventually be made available to developers who wanted to study it, modify it or use parts of the implementation as a starting point for their own work.That meant the Codester version had a completely different job from the itch.io demo.The playable demo needed to make it easy to experience the game. The Codester listing needed to make it clear that this was the complete Godot source project behind that game.

Preparing a source-code product changes the way you look at your own work. When I was the only person opening the project, I did not need to explain to myself where things were or why certain files existed. Once someone else might be downloading the same project, that becomes more important. I went through the package again from that perspective and checked that the version being released was the version I actually wanted another developer to see.I also had to think much more carefully about presentation. Developers buying source code are not only interested in whether the finished game looks good. They want to know what is inside the project and what they are actually paying for. The listing therefore had to explain that Axirune was not simply a few isolated scripts or a small template. It was the complete working Godot project used to build the game.That included the connected systems that make a finished project useful: the puzzle mechanics, campaign structure, interface, menus, save behaviour, hints, artwork, audio and all the other pieces that are less impressive individually but important when you want to understand how an entire game fits together.

Codester also introduced a different kind of pressure because the product would now be sitting alongside source-code products from other developers. On my own website I control the entire presentation. On an established marketplace, someone can compare your product with dozens of alternatives in a few minutes, so the screenshots, description and overall package have to explain themselves quickly.I did not want to exaggerate what Axirune was, but I also did not want to undersell the amount of work inside it. Finding that balance took more time than I expected.

Realising That Nobody Knows the Game Exists

Once the itch.io demo was available and the source-code product was being prepared for Codester, another fairly obvious problem became difficult to ignore.People still needed to know Axirune existed.

Making a game and publishing a game are not the same thing as getting anyone to notice it. A new website does not automatically have an audience, and simply uploading something to a marketplace does not guarantee that people will stop and look at it.That was when I started spending much more time on video.I had gameplay footage already, but putting together an actual trailer turned out to be very different from simply recording the game. Raw gameplay makes sense when you already know what is happening. A trailer has to communicate the idea much faster.

I wanted the YouTube trailer to show enough of the game to explain what Axirune was without turning into a long tutorial. That meant choosing footage that showed the puzzle mechanics clearly, cutting out the slow parts and working out when text actually helped rather than adding text simply because trailers are expected to have it.There was quite a lot of trial and error involved.

Some sequences looked fine when I watched the original gameplay but felt too slow once they were placed into a trailer. Some text looked useful while editing and then felt unnecessary when the whole video was played back. Music changed the feeling of the same footage far more than I expected, and transitions that looked impressive on their own could quickly become distracting if there were too many of them.The final result needed to feel like Axirune rather than like a collection of effects placed over gameplay.

That was the main goal.

YouTube and TikTok Needed Different Videos

I also started working on TikTok, and that made it obvious very quickly that I could not simply take the same YouTube trailer and expect it to work everywhere.YouTube gives you a little more time to establish what somebody is looking at. TikTok does not.A TikTok video has to make sense almost immediately because people are already prepared to swipe to the next thing. That meant thinking more carefully about the opening seconds, using faster cuts and getting to the actual game sooner.The vertical format created its own problems as well. Axirune was not designed around a phone-shaped video frame, so gameplay footage that looked perfectly normal in a standard trailer could suddenly lose important information when converted to a vertical layout. I had to be much more deliberate about what was visible and how each section was framed.I also learned that making something shorter does not necessarily make it easier.

A longer trailer gives you room to explain. A short video forces you to decide what actually matters.For Axirune, that meant showing the puzzle itself, giving enough information to make the source-code product understandable and then getting out of the way before the video overstayed its welcome.The YouTube and TikTok videos eventually became two different ways of presenting the same project. The YouTube trailer could spend a little more time showing the game and building a sense of progression, while TikTok needed to work as a much quicker introduction for somebody who had never seen Axirune before.

The Release Became More Than One Store

By the end of the month, I had also changed the way I thought about where Axirune should live online.

Originally it would have been easy to think of the HK Lab Studio website as the store and everything else as secondary. In practice, that does not make much sense for a new independent studio. Established platforms already have people searching for games, source projects and developer resources, whereas my own website still has to build that audience from scratch.The more practical approach was to use each platform for what it was good at.

The HK Lab Studio website could remain the main home for the project and the place where I control the presentation, product information and future catalogue. itch.io could make it easy for players to discover and try the playable game. Codester could put the complete source project in front of developers who were already browsing for code and development products. YouTube and TikTok could then help introduce Axirune to people who were not actively searching for it at all.Those channels are doing different jobs, but they all lead back to the same project.That was probably the biggest change in my thinking during August. I stopped looking at the release as a single page with a Buy button and started seeing it as a collection of different entry points.Someone might first see a TikTok clip, another person might find the source code while browsing Codester, and somebody else might play the demo through itch.io. None of them necessarily discover Axirune in the same way.

That is normal.What matters is that once they do find it, the different parts of the release make sense together.

What August Actually Taught Me

Looking back at August, very little of the work involved adding anything new to Axirune itself. The game did not suddenly gain another mechanic because I uploaded it to itch.io, and the puzzles did not become better because I created a trailer. Most of the month was spent taking something that already existed and figuring out how to put it in front of people properly.It was still development work in a sense, just a different kind.Instead of asking whether the game worked, I was asking whether the browser demo worked for somebody else, whether the source-code package made sense to another developer and whether a person watching a short video could understand enough about Axirune to decide if they wanted to know more.That distinction is something I probably would not have understood properly before building the game.

When I started the project earlier this year, most of my attention was on whether I could actually make it. By August that question had already been answered. Axirune existed, the game worked and the complete Godot project was there.The new question was whether I could release it in a way that gave it a reasonable chance of being discovered.The itch.io demo, the Codester listing and the YouTube and TikTok trailers were the first real steps towards answering that.There is still a lot to learn about distribution and marketing, particularly when you are starting without an existing audience, but at least Axirune is no longer sitting on my computer waiting for somebody to find it. There are now several ways to discover the game, play it and, for developers who are interested in how it was built, get access to the complete project behind it.

After spending most of the year concentrating on making Axirune, August was the month I finally started learning how to put it out into the world.