Sometimes Cards may roll over from Run to Run without ever getting the attention they need. Often this points to an underlying issue like missing information, unclear assignment or lacking resources. Among many Cards in a Run, it is easy to overlook these.
To help you identify these cases, we’re introducing our new Beast Mode system for teams on our Pro
plan! Once you enable Beast Mode, Cards that don’t reach completion by the end of a Run, will be highlighted with a new Beast Level marker. A Beast Level increases every time a Card misses its target of being done by the end of a Run.
You can customize how the Beast Mode works by clicking the new Beast icon on the header bar of each Run:
This is a new feature we’ve successfully tested internally to better identify those annoying stalling Cards that aren’t making progress repeatedly. This allowed us to reassess these Cards, fill in missing information and clear up confusion. We’ve also added sorting and searching options to quickly find Beast Cards.
Having the Beast level tied to a Card may feel a bit direct, so we’re looking for your feedback regarding how these feel. We believe this feature can help bring attention to Cards that need more support and ultimately improve progress in a playful way — just as you know us. Now go ahead and squash those Beasts before they level up further!
More information can be found in our Manual.
Hey Codeckers! Whether you’re navigating through sidebars, organizing your Journeys, or fine-tuning your Runs, we’ve got some big improvements that will make your workflow smoother and more magical.
We’ve given one of the core elements of Codecks a significant upgrade! The sidebars now slide in as overlays rather than displacing content. Here’s why that’s awesome:
And since conversations haven’t seen a design update in years, we gave it fresh coat of paint as well.
We’re eager to hear what you think of this new experience!
Journeys just got a turbo boost!
This opens up all sorts of new possibilities, like:
Journeys have always been magical, and now they’re even better!
Our Run feature has been leveling up with these handy new options:
Shift+S
to quickly set a Hero card for the one you’ve got open.!
during card creation.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. 🚀
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:
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:
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.
shift + d
). The overlay also allows you to directly create new Zones. A button on the bulk action bar was added as well.b
to x
(after all x looks more like the selection icon).j / k
or arrow keys works much more reliably now and even when having multiple Cards selected.cmd/ctrl + enter
now saves the Card, even if the focus is outside the text editor.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.
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.
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.
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 make it easier to distinguish between past and upcoming milestones. Past milestones now only have an outline while upcoming ones are filled.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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! 👋
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:
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.
We know you love your card cover images! Codecks now offers you more control for how a card’s cover image is presented.
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:
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.
We hope you like the new release!