Changelog

You have been asking for them for a long time: This release finally brings our own support for Runs (a.k.a. sprints)! And on top of that we have a ton of usability improvements making you go even faster. 🚀

Runs

You can now add Runs. These are automatically recurring milestones — in other tools often called sprints or cycles. The term ‘sprint’ comes with a bit of implied baggage and since we wanted to create our own interpretation, we decided to use a different terminology, inspired by sprints and dungeon runs. 🏃🏽

These Runs are shown as bars within the Timeline. You can set up multiple Run configurations at once and set the following properties:

• A short code to identify each Run configuration
• Associated project(s)
• Length (e.g. weekly, fortnightly, monthly)
• Amount of upcoming Runs to show in timeline
• The weekday on which to start each Run

Runs not only save you a lot of busy work, but help you segment your work further. You can assign Runs and Milestones independently to any Card. This way you can plan your weekly progress towards a big release Milestone. Or track different Milestones initiatives in the same weekly Run. We made the setup as flexible as possible.

Some more highlights about this new feature:

• You can automatically add a Milestone to all Cards inside a Run.
• You can automatically move assigned, in-review and/or blocked Cards to your next Run.
• You can pin Runs, to show them conveniently inside your hand tab.
• We added a new ‘Run’ event to Decky, so that you can keep your community updated.

Reworked Mouse and Keyboard Shortcuts

We completely reworked mouse and keyboard shortcuts in Codecks, making them faster to use than ever before. Now all shortcuts are easier to access and use the awesome quick settings panel, which can be completely navigated by using mouse or just keyboard.

• Instead of showing you only the most recent 5 Decks, the new Deck picker allows you to select any Deck immediately, without having to click through to open the extended Deck picker.
• Clicking on any of the following icons now opens the fitting quick settings: Effort, Priority, Owner, Milestone, Run. This works across Table and Card views.
• All relevant bulk actions now also use the Quick Settings panel, allowing you the same keyboard wizardry as when working on a single Card.
• We added a brand-new shortcut for quickly updating the zone of one or multiple Cards (shift + d). The overlay also allows you to directly create new Zones. A button on the bulk action bar was added as well.

• We moved the shortcut for selecting Cards from b to x (after all x looks more like the selection icon).
• Navigating the Cards via j / k or arrow keys works much more reliably now and even when having multiple Cards selected.
• Clicking on a hand icon on a Card or in Table mode, now opens the hand overview directly.
• Clicking on a hourglass icon opens the Card with the history panel already expanded.

More Usability Improvements

• Default Order: Both Milestones and Runs now allow saving a default view for your whole team.
• Hide Empty: We added the option to hide empty Zones in Manual sort order. This setting can be saved as part of your default view.
• Sub Card View: Empty groups in the Sub Card list are now hidden, when filtering is enabled.
• Timeline Scale: You can now switch between a week-based or day-based scale for the Timeline. The setting is located in the Organization settings and can be customized within User Profile section.
• Search: We added a search option for Project Spaces (as well as Run-related searches).
• User Report Uploads: New User Report uploads now count towards your quota and can be found (and deleted) in the Media Library.
• Open Decks: No longer show Milestone information for open Decks.
• Activity Feed: You can now click on comments to open the conversation in the Card.
• Effort Calculations: A Hero Card’s effort now uses the new fallback effort introduced in the last release for effort-less sub Cards to calculate its total effort. We’ve made sure that effort calculations throughout the app now are consistent.

Minor Improvements and Fixes

• Card Editor: cmd/ctrl + enter now saves the Card, even if the focus is outside the text editor.
• Table View: Fixed issue with Cards sometimes being invisible.
• Deck Change: Moving a started Card to a different Deck no longer stops the Card.
• Cover Image Editor: Fixed issue of grabbing state not stopping.
• Workload: We improved the error message when entering invalid data in the workload settings.

We can’t wait to hear what you’ll think about this update. Let us know on our discord community server.

Danke schön! With love from Berlin. 💜

In this release, we focused on improvements for milestones and for tracking work. This is part of a bigger initiative to improve big-picture planning and tracking within Codecks. We’re excited to bring you more tools to plan your project from start to finish.

Milestones

New Milestone View

The milestones tab now features a redesigned, sleek, dark-themed area. We’ve switched to a week-based timeline scale so you can see more upcoming milestones at once. Calendar and milestone overviews are now easily accessible via two new buttons in the top right corner and appear as overlays. The calendar sidebar now also displays week numbers.

Capacity Tracking

Milestones now feature a capacity tracking widget which you can access from the milestone sidebar. The widget shows how work is distributed across your teammates. You can also set the individual capacity of each team member to highlight members that might be overbooked or out of work. The milestone header also shows your individual capacity at a quick glance.

Milestone Info

We’ve revamped the milestone info you see when hovering over a milestone icon or in the milestone sidebar. We got rid of the confusing and hard to find card-based or effort-based counting toggle. The new milestone info combines the best of both worlds: card icons show individual card counts per type, and an expanded horizontal bar shows total progress based on card effort, including blocked, reviewed, done, and other cards. The bar also shows current team velocity and overall milestone progress. We also updated the burn-up chart styling for better readability. A new organization setting was introduced which allows to pick a fallback effort for cards with no explicit effort.

New Milestone Icons

New milestone icons make it easier to distinguish between past and upcoming milestones. Past milestones now only have an outline while upcoming ones are filled.

Activity Stream

We added activity streams to the milestone and deck sidebars, keeping you up-to-date with current events without having to switch into a different view. To see the full activity stream - including the ability to filter for certain activity types - you can jump into the full activity stream view as previously. We also redesigned the activity items to make them a bit more compact and quicker to read.

Soon to come

We’re putting the final touches on our upcoming support for sprints. Since a card can be assigned to a sprint and milestone at the same time, this will also improve long-term planning in Codecks, allowing you to have recurring sprints while tracking overall progress towards a release goal. You can expect this update very soon.

Property Panel

The property panel has a new, modern look. The milestone picker is now a list, showing more of the milestone name and target date. Not seeing the right milestone in the list? Just click the ‘pick’ button to open the new milestone selection. The new menu can also be quickly navigated using the keyboard, allowing access to previous milestones and other card properties.

Hero Cards

Previously, hero cards were automatically set to done once all the sub cards were done. This was not always the desired design. Even worse, a hero card that went into done without anybody noticing, could result in the hero card being auto-archived and seemingly disappearing. Some users avoided this behavior by adding placeholder sub cards.

Instead, hero cards will now never be automatically set to done. To set a hero card to done, use the new done button, which can be pressed once all the sub cards are done or archived.

Table Mode

We improved the readability of the table mode, by tweaking font sizes and reworking how hero card titles are condensed. Additionally, the table columns will now automatically adapt to your view pane, dropping columns to maintain readability if necessary. We also added the ‘quick add’ feature to more sorting options of the table view. Table view is a pro feature.

Further Fixes and Improvements

• Card cover editor: Sub cards correctly inherit card cover settings from parent card.
• Deck Selector: Groups decks by both, projects and spaces.
• Browser Autocomplete: Forms should trigger less browser autocomplete prompts.
• Decky: Images of feedback entries are embedded directly into the message (instead of the embed tile) to avoid having those images being deleted by Discord’s cache.
• Image Uploads: Fix duplicate uploads in Chrome when pasting an image.
• Auto Tags: Fix auto tag issue when moving a deck across projects.

Let us know what you think about the release, and let your friends and peers know about Codecks. This is the best support that we can get towards building the best project platform for game devs.

Danke schön! With love from Berlin.

We’re starting 2024 strong with a big update! A lot of these come from direct feedback that we’ve heard from long-time users. We’re working hard on making Codecks even better for you. And of course also for all the new Codecks users that have discovered us recently. Great to have you with us! 👋

Spaces

In the past, we’ve recommended creating multiple projects per game to improve the structure, but that is not necessary anymore. You can now create spaces to group your project decks.

While working on the decks tab, we’re also introducing the following:

• Previously, each person was seeing their personal deck order. This could cause confusion about where to find a deck. Changing the order now sets it for the whole team so that everybody will see the same thing.
• Spaces are collapsible, so you can quickly hide decks that are not relevant.
• Spaces come with a suggested name and icon. You’re free to edit these, though.
• We also redesigned the project headers to make them easier recognizable, putting a bigger emphasis on your chosen project cover images. You can even set a new image by dragging an image file directly onto the new project headers.
• And we added a project settings button directly next to each project header as well, to make it quicker to reach.

Guardians

As teams grow, the need for supervision may increase. So we came up with fairly unique twist: you can now declare Guardians on a per-deck basis.

Guardians are automatically added to any review happening in that deck. A card can’t be set to done without going through a Guardian review. Guardians are also the only ones that are allowed to archive, delete or move cards within that deck - besides producers and admins.

We’re also testing a new, more explicit review flow here. In decks with Guardians, the opt-out button becomes an ‘approve’ button. Card owners will only be able to mark the review as successful if all Guardians approved the review.

This mirrors the way that regular reviews are most commonly used, and we decided to make this framing a bit more explicit. If successful, we will likely also revisit regular reviews and look into making their usage a bit more clear.

Decks without Guardians are working as usual. Guardians are a Pro plan feature, as they are aimed at bigger studios that need the additional support to control their workflows.

Card Cover Image Editor

We know you love your card cover images! Codecks now offers you more control for how a card’s cover image is presented.

• New Cover Image Editor allows you to position the image more precisely.
• You can choose between rendering the card image in a light or dark mode.
• You can toggle the blur effect towards the bottom.

Deck & Milestone Descriptions and Cover Images

We want to make Codecks a welcoming home where newcomers on your team find their bearings easily. To allow you to show explanation texts, we added support for bigger deck and milestones descriptions, in the previous release.

We’re extending this feature further:

• The description text area inside the edit-milestone window has been moved completely to the new description sidebar. Updating these now works the same way across decks and milestones.
• To make your description texts stand out, we’re now also supporting cover images. For milestones, these cover images will also be used in the preview overlay.
• As a cherry on top, the description area now also supports referencing cards and users.

Default Views

You can save your sort options on a per-deck basis, but the UX for this was a bit harder to grasp than we wanted. The default viewing option would be marked with a star and if you would diverge from the default view, a reset-view button would show up next to the search field on the other side of the screen.

We’ve reworked this feature by adding a ‘Default View’ panel below the sorting options. From here you can easily save a new default view or reset your view. All in one place! If your current view setting differs from the suggested default view, we now show a green dot on the sorting button to let you know.

Further Fixes and Improvements

• Selection: To select multiple cards, you had to click small checkmark icons. We can understand how this was confusing! The new selection icon looks more like a regular selection rectangle now.
• I18N: Improved support for RTL scripts like Arabic within card content.
• Decky: Fixed issue for reports that had both a threshold and an attachment.
• Importers: Deck statistics are correctly calculated after importing a new project from Trello or HacknPlan
• Decks: Setting Deck Milestone has been moved to the 🤖 icon
• Card Creation: No more unsaved drafts if creating a card takes longer than 2 seconds.
• User Management: Users can remove themselves from organizations.
• Drag and Drop: When drop areas overlap, the top-most one will be chosen when dropping.

We hope you like the new release!