We were genuinely excited to sit down with the team at Placeholder Gameworks and peek behind the scenes of CraftCraft. From running a cozy little workshop to getting to know a wonderfully quirky cast of characters, the game left a strong impression on us—and we couldn’t wait to learn how it all came together. In this showcase, the team shares how they used articy:draft to keep track of characters, choices, and reactivity, and how those tools helped turn a simple merchant fantasy into a warm, character-driven RPG experience.
Articy: Please introduce yourselves and tell us about the team at Placeholder Gameworks working on CraftCraft
Placeholder Gameworks : Hi! It’s Leene and Oak from Placeholder Gameworks. We had a modestly sized, international, and quite diverse team from all over the world working on the game.
Articy: CraftCraft is an RPG merchant sim with actual crafting going on. What was your inspiration for the story?
Leene: There were multiple inspirations for making the game. The core idea stemmed from my experience with Elder Scrolls games where I wished to not just live the life of the adventurer that we have seen countless of times but the life of the cat merchant. Someone on the sideline, calmly supporting the heroes. We really appreciate when the story is about an “everyday hero” and we are happy there are more and more games that offer that experience.
Also, crafting is a widespread hobby and we saw countless comments on YouTube crafting videos that mentioned not being able to afford or have time for the hobby. Video games are a great medium of trying out lifetimes worth of jobs and roles with less investment but more interactivity than watching a video.
RPG-s and Simulations are close to our heart and we will keep on making them to enrich people’s lives with new experiences. And we can’t think of a more cosy experience than tinkering in your workshop and meeting and having a relationship with a lot of wholesome characters while learning about a fantastical world that is out there through the stories they tell you.
Articy: The players encounter a huge cast of quirky characters and craft either jewels or weapons for them which can impact their lives. How did you manage to keep track of so many characters’ storylines and all the different possible outcomes?
Oak: As always, the answer is global variables. We don’t have a *lot* of branching in the game, but we do have some, and we have a bit of reactivity concerning choices that you can make. We have increased that reactivity a bit with our recent updates, and hopefully will keep on doing that. Most of our dialogues are self-contained and one-off and progress linearly, so that enabled us to put the reactivity in subsequent dialogues as time passes in the game, keeping overall complexity low.
Leene: The global variables help characters have a memory and react to players’ past decisions. This makes choices matter and your relationships with the characters feel real and impactful. The characters might react to your player species or the background you have chosen. They will remember if you did a great or bad job on their commissions and a bunch of specific things you might have mentioned to them before.
I would like to highlight a fun specific use case we had in this game: when a character has an access to all the knowledge in the Global Variables, it can make magic feel real. In CraftCraft you will meet a fortune teller that can peer into your player characters past, present and future. As the player has chosen their background archetype, the fortune teller can pull information from that, also she can see what choices you have made in the game thus far and some of these will lead you to certain outcomes that she will know of as well even if they haven’t happened yet! A character that can pull from all the background info turns into a magical all-seeing eye for the past, present and the future!
Oak: There’s also the consideration that we didn’t want to make a gigantic content monster of a game. We wanted each character present to have sufficient airtime to make an impactful moment for the player, thus making them more unique in the way they talk, in their background, and how they interact with the player. This was already a bit of a constraint for complexity, so the end result is quite granular in the sense that each character has their own specific story to tell, with little interaction between them (besides a few very notable exceptions *coughSaskiacough*).
So in short: we tried to keep it simple. Keep the characters mostly contained to their own devices, and let the player experience them in a sequential fashion. Any reactivity was to be mostly contained within the same single character, unless it was deemed necessary for their story.
Articy: You also used articy:draft for your previous game Death and Taxes, did you reuse the same templates and are there any changes in the way you used articy:draft between the two games? Any new learnings/tips you’d like to share with other users?
Oak: We didn’t really transfer any templates directly, but we did transfer knowledge from the previous team to the new team. What we did was create all the character templates required for dialogue set-up in articy, and handled everything else required for the narrative (mainly the quests) on the Godot side of things.
Was that the right choice? Maybe. It’s hard to say. This was our first Godot game as a collective and thus we did have quite a lot to learn as we worked on the game. There’s definitely more and/or different avenues to explore on how to set up data management and what to keep on articy’s side and what to keep engine-side, but in the end we were happy with the result we got. Most of the lessons we took from Death and Taxes came with us to CraftCraft, so our pipeline was roughly the same. There was less data to handle on articy’s side this time round, though, which made most of the articy-side setup very simple.
Articy: What kind of impact did articy:draft have on your development process?
Oak: Simply put, it completely streamlined our writing and narrative design process. It helped us also structure the narrative in a cohesive manner, separating characters and dialogues per chapter, for example. It also enabled our writers to work on things away from the, uh, scary grinding gears of game engines. While articy doesn’t natively support Godot (it would be great if it did ^_^), it was not too much of a challenge to get it working with a .json export, especially considering most of what we needed to handle on the engine side was just dialogues, global variables, and character definitions.
Articy: Now that you have gained more experience, if you were to give a small piece of wisdom to a brand new team about to start their new studio, what would that be?
Oak: Start small, but dream big! Get your first game out as fast as you feasibly can. It doesn’t need to be perfect, but you do need to ship something so you understand all the motions that come with launching a game and maintaining it. You can always work your way up and learn from your successes and mistakes one step at a time.
Leene: Make your game work around one central mechanic. Like building one tower instead of a whole castle. In time, you can add more towers to it and make it a whole castle but it is better to have a complete tower first that is solid and fun enough and not have a large half made castle that might never be finished.
CraftCraft is available on: Steam GOG