Nodecraft's optimization to publish new game releases

Nodecraft uses Storyblok as a rich multi-level CMS that acts as a touchpoint for all of the content on its website, application, and more. With Storyblok, they were able to create over 100 different content types that are interlinked to produce robust content pieces across multiple platforms. 

Nodecraft was launched in 2012 by a small group of innovators with decades of experience in infrastructure, creativity, and the online gaming space. Back then, game servers were for hardcore gamers. Today, with modern social media privacy concerns, combined with Nodecraft’s advancing technology in the game server hosting industry, game servers are becoming more ubiquitous to average gamers (much like a Discord server). Nodecraft allows gamers worldwide to create their own online game servers to play with friends, their online communities, or complete strangers. With their own game server, they can control who they play and customize everything about the worlds they share and create together. The product makes it easier to set up a game server for dozens of games which you can save and swap between.

Optimizing content efforts to Storyblok

Prior to Storyblok, Nodecraft authored the majority of its content in its own in-house CMS or directly through its development and product teams. Such an approach prevented any non-technical team members from contributing to the majority of content on their website or in the application, along with several other roadblocks: 

• While any new content could be updated, it lacked visibility or oversight of the entire process
• Nodecraft was not able to bring new content or marketing campaigns to any application or website without directly involving their development team 
• Most of the company could only report issues or typos on the website 
• When given access to the content, there was no way to preview the changes made until it went live and was cached
• Turnaround times to correct changes after publishing further reduced productivity
• Leadership at Nodecraft was frustrated by the lack of access and visibility to author new content - any new content updates that should have taken a few hours of work would often result in days, if not weeks. 

Throughout this process, Nodecraft started testing out a headless CMS. After weeks of working with Sanity, Nodecraft’s team ran into roadblocks with the content authoring process. With Nodecraft being a Vue shop, they were no strangers to authoring content in other frameworks. Despite having a framework barrier, there were other major limitations to how content could reference one another and have near-infinity depts of sub-categories or other types of content. 

With just 2 to 3 weeks already being done with the other headless CMS, while talking about an upcoming game they were adding to the platform called Satisfactory, the development team was quick to notice that the site was built on Storyblok, with Vue. 

Storyblok came into view for its Visual Editor, where they could extend their own custom Vue extensions, combined with a robust backend API that helped solve the limitations found in Sanity.

Using Storyblok to publish new game releases

Nodecraft uses Storyblok as a key content management system for their website, in-application, and mobile application. The team started to integrate into their user-facing control panel, accessible via app.nodecraft.com as well as via their mobile applications. One of their first integrations with Storyblok on their mobile apps and user control panel is for their Partners, where they moved all of our Partner News from an internal system to Storyblok for better management, ease of writing, and usage across our various platforms. This lets their marketing and partnerships teams coordinate better, publish news more frequently for our partners, and continue growing those relationships. 

Nodecraft were able to use Storyblok’s User Roles to empower their team to author content with each new game release. A ritual at Nodecraft, which predates their Storyblok adoption, includes new employees uploading their avatar, setting their preferred name, creating a biography, and publishing the changes on the live website. As a result, hand-in-hand with Storyblok’s User Roles allows them to establish a level of trust with their team and have new employees quickly learn the ins and outs of the system. 

With each new game release, marketing webpages, support knowledge base articles, and metadata are needed to make the experience relevant to their users. With Storyblok, create a review process, add permissions, and have rollbacks of content if needed. 

Overall, Storyblok was able to provide Nodecraft with the following: 

• Faster turnaround for content adoption - weeks of work by 2 to 3 people can now be accomplished by 1 person in a matter of minutes
• User Roles to empower colleagues to author content in order to launch new game release campaigns accordingly
• A Visual Editor for the team to see exactly what was being updated 
• To edit and manage content without the help of the development team
• Vue framework that is compatible with Nodecraft’s knowledge
• Stability and ease of use for non-technical users
• A robust API response time and developer experience