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8 Best Project Management Tools for Game Development (The Ultimate List)

Post by

Nada

June 06, 2023

Nada is a marketing intern at Codecks and has a diverse background as a Moroccan who has lived in 3 different countries throughout her studies. Recently, she successfully obtained her bachelor's degree in business management, with skills acquired through both corporate and humanitarian experiences. She is simply curious, motivated, and eager to learn!

Codecks is a project management tool inspired by collectible card games. Sounds interesting? Check out our homepage for more information.

Embarking on a game project? That means that you’ll be dealing with one of the most complex development processes in the world. You’ll be on the bleeding edge of art, code, design and marketing. Even as a solo dev managing the complex interactions between these can be overwhelming and you might want to use a tool that helps you stay organized. Once you start growing a team and deal with complex dependencies and information flows between team members, using a dedicated tool becomes a necessity.

But choosing the right tool is not easy. Adopting a new software takes time and effort and you don’t want to make the mistake of choosing a tool that is either too simple or too complex for your situation. The transaction costs of moving to a new application can be quite painful (even if worthwhile for the right choice).

To help you on this big question we’ve looked at 8 common project management choices for game devs and compared them for you. These tools are used by solo devs and by big teams alike. We’ll compare their feature sets and suitability for different team scales, so that you’ll hopefully have an easier time what the right tool is for you.

#1 Codecks
#2 Trello
#3 Jira
#4 HacknPlan
#5 Notion
#6 Monday
#7 ClickUp
#8 YouTrack
Recap

What is project management in game development?

Let’s first analyze what typical goals are associated with project management in video games:

Tracking development tasks
Tracking milestone deliveries (e.g. game launches or publisher deliverables)
Facilitate collaboration and efficient communication between team mates
Documenting game design docs, reports and decisions
Tracking and triaging bug reports and feedback

These goals shift based on the current stage of your game development project. Here are the six stages through which most video game projects go:

Planning and conception
During the conceptualization phase, developers brainstorm ideas, themes, and gameplay mechanics. This is also the time to do competitor and target group analysis. A lot of game developers use game jams to come up with new game ideas (especially interesting for smaller mechanical games).

Main Project Management Duty: Documenting and collecting game design ideas
Pre-production
Once a game concept is picked up, pre-production starts. This phase of the project is about exploration. Do the game mechanics hold up as envisioned? How is the asset pipeline constructed? In this phase developers try to answer any open technical and creative questions, which could endanger the project in later phases and so that the production phase can happen as smoothly as possible. This is the phase in which game developers will often seek out publishers for additional resources. How to pitch to publishers.

Main Project Management Duty: Tracking development tasks
Production
With the groundwork laid, production is where most of the development time is spent. Developers start creating all the required game assets and building out the missing non-critical features, which were relegated to this phase (e.g. the credits screen, main menu). Ideally the pre-production phase has allowed to collect enough metrics about how long different types of assets take to build, so that a reasonable estimates can be done about the total game production length.

Main Project Management Duty: Tracking asset pipelines and dependencies
Quality Assurance and Polishing
The final stage before releasing the game involved rigorously testing the game for bugs (often employing external QA studios) and fixing the often hundreds of remaining bugs, glitches, and balancing issues.

Main Project Management Duty: Tracking bugs and triaging
Launch
The culmination of hard work arrives with the game’s launch. As this point all assets and features will have to be in a shippable state. When working with a publisher various milestone deliveries will have to have been tracked throughout the project.

Main Project Management Duty: Tracking milestone deliveries
Post-Release (i.e. patches and DLCs)
However, this is not the end but the beginning of a new chapter. Developers continue to gather player feedback, release updates, and patches, ensuring the game remains engaging and enjoyable. Community engagement is vital for fostering a loyal player base.

Main Project Management Duty: Collecting community feedback

As seen above the focus and priorities shift with every stage of development. That’s why a versatile project management tool that can support you throughout all of these phases is so important to get right.

So let’s dive right in and review how well these 8 project management tools do across these areas.

What is the best game development project management software?

Codecks

#1 Codecks

First on the list is Codecks, a project management tool distinguished for its unique design and pragmatic approach. It combines both project and community management in one site. Its motto is to work playfully, as it was conceived by game developers for game developers.

Your Hand

🦾 Task Tracking

Codecks uses a pragmatic battle-proven workflow model that is inspired by many years of real-world game dev experiences by it’s development team that worked on games like Spec Ops: The Line, Dead Island 2, Curious Expedition and more.

The playful visual design is inspired by trading card games, since this metaphor is not only easy to grasp and conveys a lot of information, but also makes the app feel more welcoming to the whole team, not only embracing the techies on the team, but all disciplines with a intuitive, yet powerful production system.

Cards in Codecks support estimations, milestones, conversations, pipelines (so called Journeys), dependencies, community management and more out of the box. The development team put a big focus on providing all the features required for game production across all stages in one single package.

📖 Document Handling

Documents are first-class citizens in Codecks. Cards can be marked as “doc cards”. Links and back links allow to build complex wiki structures without having to use additional tools. This makes it easier to collaborate on tasks since documentation and tasks can be kept on the same platform.

🔌 Integrations

Codecks is completely focused on being the best platform for game devs, so it’s integrations are focused on the tools that game devs used. In contrast to other tools on this list it offers a strong discord integration that allows to collect feedback and bug reports from your discord community.

In addition it offers unique Unity and Unreal5 plugins that collect bugs right from your game. Of course several other integrations like Slack, Github, Gitlab etc. are also available.

💰 Pricing Model

Plan	Free	Plus	Pro	Enterprise
Price/User/Month	0€	5€	9€	15€

Trello

#2 Trello

Second on the list is Trello, which most of you must already be quite familiar with, given its popularity if you’re looking for a Kanban board-oriented project management tool.

Trello