Changelog

Full release of the new Hand

Now Codecks is even more like playing with cards! We’ve refined the beta of the Hand v2 for more than half a year and it’s now ready for being rolled out to everyone. The completely redesigned Hand tab provides each user with a personal work queue and quick access to conversations and bookmarks.

Cards in your old Hand have been moved to bookmarks.

For more information check out the video below and our manual entry.

More improvements and fixes

• Swim lanes / Hand: Effort summary now shows completed vs total effort. This area now also contains a summary of the time tracked within a swim lane.
• Metrics: Search filters now affects all relevant metrics.
• Search: Input grows if many filters are present
• Search: Allow searching for “undone” cards.
• Conversations: Fix missing click event for Avatars without image.
• Conversations: More reliable detection of mentioned users when @mentions weren’t directly entered via the editor.
• Dependencies: Archived or done cards being unblocked no longer results in a notification.
• Account creation: resolved a conflict that could happen when user created a new org and was invited to a different org.
• Digest Mails: We’re now syncing your browser’s time zone with your user account. This means we’ll now send daily digests at ~6:15am of your time zone (instead of 6:15am CET). Time stamps in emails are now also converted into your time zone.

New Episode of the Game Production Podcast

In our fourth episode Riad is talking with Philomena Schwab, the co-founder of Stray Fawn Studio (Niche, Nimbatus, The Wandering Village) about the best indie game marketing tricks. Listen to the podcast or read the full transcription on our blog.

Card Dependencies for Pro users in Beta

Dependencies in Codecks are finally here!

• Mark any card as incoming and outgoing dependency
• Automate recurring dependency chains by applying dependencies to journeys
• Filter out locked out cards, so you can focus on cards that are ready to be worked on
• Get notified if a card you owned got unlocked
• This feature is available to Pro users only (This includes users on the education plan as well)

To enable dependencies for your org, open the Mission Control via the Joystick Icon and look for Organization Settings > Features

You can find the manual page for dependencies here.

Towards more community driven public projects

In future releases we will be focussing on more ways for your audience to engage with your cards. Visitors of your open decks will be able to directly upvote cards from the website. In preparation of that we’re changing our iconography for upvoting: upvotes are now represented by a potion icon. Journeys - who used a potion icon before - are now represented by a new icon.

We’re also reframing how users are interacting with your open decks page. To receive updates they are asked to “join your community”. This will allow them to create a Codecks user account or join with an existing one - and will unlock more functionality in future releases.

Further improvements and fixes

• Open decks: Added search.
• Deck creation: Deck creators are no longer automatically watching these decks. This should lead to a lot less unintended notifications.
• Hand v2: Added a button to open a search result for all your owned cards.
• Search: q shortcut for showing owned cards available everywhere where there is a search field.
• Card View: Cards won’t automatically close anymore when clicking outside the card area. You need to either hit Esc or the close button.
• Automatic cover images: Now works when creating new cards with attachments as well.
• Time Stamps: Statements like “2 minutes ago” or “Just now” will update automatically when leaving a page open.
• Infrastructure: Reworked image handling. Added support for AVIF images for modern browsers, leading to much smaller (and thus faster to load) images.

Top up credit bonus changes coming soon

Are you a Codecks Pro user, or thinking about going Pro? Would you like to save some money? Then consider topping up your account balance before November 8th, we’re going to reduce our current outrageous bonuses on that date! More specifically we’re moving from 20%-33%-50% to 10%-20%-30% bonus tiers.

Automatic cover images

We’re making it easier to fill your project with beautiful card cover images. Here are two new automation options for that:

1. Any image uploaded will become a cover image. There are two modes:

   • Use first image will only apply an attached image if there’s no cover image present already.
   • Use most recent image will overwrite any already existing cover image, which can be a convenient way to visualize the progress of a card.
2. Sub cards will inherit the cover image of their Hero card if they don’t have their own cover image set.

Both behaviors can be configured and disabled in the organization settings:

Customize your Open Decks with a background color

To give you more creative freedom, you’re now able to pick a background color for your Open Decks. We’ve also increased the dimensions of the background image.

Further improvements and fixes

• Steamy: Our Steam review bot now adds the reviewer name and avatar to the discord message.
• Conversations: Fixed display of portrait images within comments.
• Search: Clearer text hint if your current search results is excluding results in hidden projects.
• Sub card overview: Allow to filter out done & archived cards.
• Sub card overview: Add attachment icon and overlay to sub card element.
• Deck picker: Project names are always visible when scrolling down decks list.

Updated cover image styling for cards

As you know trading card games are a big inspiration for us. To make sure your cover images are as striking as they can be, we reworked our card display modes. That means that from now on they will not just be more beautiful but also easier to recognize in your decks as we preserve more of the original image color. Let us know what you think!

This is only the first step towards several image-related improvements coming to Codecks soon.

Backlinks

In the bottom right of an opened card, you will now find a number that shows how many cards mention this card. Click on the counter to toggle the card list and jump to any of those cards quickly. This is super useful for maintaining your wiki and GDD inside of Codecks.

Further improvements and fixes

• Activity Feed: You’re now able to filter your activity feed by e.g. card state changes or conversation updates.
• Font: Updated our font to the latest version(!?), also improved font rendering on Windows.
• Mini Card: Fix tooltip for the color-based project tag dot.
• Bulk Selection: Fix showing feedback for a few actions.
• Conversation Panel: Fix flickering scrollbar when images were present in comments above.
• Journeys: ctrl/cmd+a and b now work for selecting journey steps.
• Done Pile: Admins may clear team members’ done piles.
• Bulk Uploads: Fixed an issue when uploading multiple files to a single card at once.

New: we’re on YouTube!

Are you looking for tips and tricks on how to use Codecks? Look no further: we’ve recently launched our YouTube channel where we regularly post short videos to help you get the most out of our tool. As the old proverb says: please like & subscribe!

The Game Production Podcast

As you might remember, we also have a podcast dedicated to game production. After a hiatus of several months (we blame the pandemic) we’re now back on track and have recently published two new episodes featuring Marek Ziemak from 11 Bit Studios (This War of Mine, Frostpunk, Children of Morta) and Ata Sergey Nowak from Torpor Games (Suzerain), with more conversations coming soon.

#MadeWithCodecks

Last but not least, we want to give a shout out to two games that have recently been released, made by teams using Codecks: Kraken Academy!! by Happy Broccoli Games (published by Fellow Traveller) and INDUSTRIA by Blakemill (published by Headup). Congrats!

Clone Projects to other Organizations

Maybe you have multiple organization accounts with different projects but you would prefer to have one central organization account instead. Or maybe your student team started as part of your university organization but now you would like to promote your project to run in your own company account instead.

That’s easily possible now: through the organization settings you may now clone projects from one organization to another.

Cloned projects will retain all original information such as card history, activity feed, comments, attachments and once you enable your team members in the new organization, they can continue where they just left off.

Note that notifications, bookmarks and hand information won’t be transferred though.

Oh, and you’re also able to clone projects into the same organization. This might open up some interesting use cases around template projects.

Further fixes

• You can declare notification bankruptcy once again.
• Fix broken layout when entering looong words in card creation panel.
• Codecks mails now have a white background in Outlook as well.
• Improve spacing for nested lists and fixed behavior for checkbox entries with complex contents like nested lists or quotes.

Hand v2 improvements

We’re getting closer and closer to release the Hand v2 for everyone. So in case you haven’t tried it out yet, make sure to open your Org Settings and enable it in the “Features” section.

Here’s a list of things we’ve improved:

• New layout for the conversation/bookmark/team member hand section. A much more concise view to help you focus on only the important things.
• Reworked the Hand/Bookmark interactions once a card is opened. The bookmark icon has been moved from the top to the bottom right, while the hand button’s behavior is now a) consistent across all contexts and b) featured with an ctrl/cmd click interaction which allows to directly add or discard a hand without having to open the Hand Overlay.
• Likewise the bulk selection bar now has a ctrl/cmd click interaction allowing to directly add or discard multiple cards at once to the hands of their owners.
• New hand icon!

Improved release discoverability

Unless you’re part of our Discord server, it’s has been hard to discover whether a new release has happened and what it contained. To solve this, we’ve redesigned our release notes. Once you re-open Codecks after a release was made, you’ll get an overview in the app. You also get a chance to leave us your feedback, so we know whether we’re moving into the right direction.

You’ll also start seeing a blue (or yellow) dot next to the joystick icon in the header telling you to reload the page to get the latest version of Codecks.

Further improvements and fixes

• Bulk select project tags for copying them to another project.
• Fix image viewer overlay in card history and activity view.
• Don’s show disabled organizations in the Mission Control’s organization picker.
• …and a lot of smaller design and wording fixes.

Automatic Project Tags and Emojis

You are now able to set an “Auto project tag” for your decks. This means all cards within this deck will receive this tag. Removing a card from this deck removes the tag. Look for the 🤖 within your deck’s header to set it up!

In addition we now allow you to decorate project tags with emojis (not just colors)! Every card containing this tag will display this emoji in front of their title.

Combining these features allows for some powerful stuff: You can decorate your #bug project tag with the 🐞 emoji and use this tag as an “Auto project tag” for your “Bugs” deck. Now every bug card will contain a 🐞 next to their title and can be easily spotted. This feature will also help to keep an overview of your cards when you have lots of different projects. Applying different emojis to decks in you various projects will make it much clearer where a card belongs to.

Further fixes and improvements

• Hero Cards: Hero cards can now have their own effort. The effort shown on the card will be the sum of the hero card’s own effort plus their sub cards total effort. This feature can be useful in case you’re working with Hero Cards as User Stories and want to apply effort only to the User Story rather than the sub tasks.
• Project Settings: reworked the UI of the project tag settings page.
• Android: Disabled spellchecker as it led to annoying glitches in the editor.

Improvements for Hand v2

We think the concepts for the new Hand v2 are fairly unique, so we figured it’s time to make it look unique as well 💄
In addition, we’ve reworked the process for adding a card to the hand from within a deck or milestone. Rather than directly appending a card to a hand, we’re opening an overlay showing the person’s hand, allowing to reorganize it and dragging the opened card into the right place.
We’ve also changed the look of the activity feed in the hand to accommodate for the dark background as well as come up with new way to present inaccessible cards 🕵️‍♀️.

Further fixes and improvements

• Steamy: We’re now also showing the reviewer’s playtime when posting a review.
• Text editor: Support for Browser-based spell check. You can disable it from your user profile.
• Time tracking: Hero Cards now show the accumulated time of the card itself and all their sub cards. The history panel and hover info over the ⏱ icon will show the tracked time on sub cards vs the hero card itself. The vertical “micro cards” in the sub card side panel now also contains the ⏱ icon if time was tracked.
• Attachments: The download button should now start a download rather than opening the file in a new tab.
• Open Decks: The updated layout is now applied to all open decks.
• Automatic filtering: When looking at big decks or milestones, an automatic “me” filter is applied to prevent being overwhelmed. The user profile now allows to change the card count threshold or disabling this behavior altogether.
• Mission control: Restyled the project tiles to make them look more draggable.
• Search: You can now filter cards by their Discord upvote count.
• Snoozing cards: Cards only get unsnoozed if a user actively unsnoozes it. Changing any property of a snoozing card no longer automatically unsnoozes it.
• Slack integration: fixed the “Create a card” action for the action dropdown on messages.

Say Hello to Steamy!

We’ve been working on a sweet little tool to help game developers to keep an eye on their Steam reviews. Rather than constantly hitting F5 on your Steam page to get the latest reviews, you can setup Steamy to connect to your Discord server. Enter all the games for which you’d like to track reviews and Steamy will continuously check them and post the latest reviews to a Discord channel of your choice.

Steamy is free and works for Codecks and non-Codecks users alike. You can access the Open Beta version here: www.codecks.io/steam-bot

Further improvements and fixes

• Mini Cards: Preview conversations and attachments when hovering over the attachment or conversation icons.
• Mini Cards: Show a gray conversation bubble for cards with conversations that you’re not a part of.
• Emojis: Fixed an issue with displaying emojis containing e.g. skin color information.

Updates for Hand v2

• Displays a hand’s total effort if any card has an effort value.
• Add activity button to the left of the hand screen. This activity view allows to browse your personal or other team member’s latest activity.
• Allow horizontal scrolling on mobile in the hand view.
• Add “select all” functionality, both via ctrl+a and a dedicated button.
• Esc allows to close the done pile

Further improvements and fixes

• Selection: Selection using the shift key is now much more robust. We’ve also reworked the Select all functionality. It’s now container-based and can be progressively expanded. I.e. hitting ctrl+a (or the Select all) button once will select all cards of the current swim lane(s). Hitting it again will select all cards on the screen. Inverting the selection via i is now also container-based.
• Image viewer: Now allows to navigate through images within the card content and comments via left and right cursors (or via the arrow icons).
• Hero Cards: Sub card progress is no longer represented as a line. Instead every sub card is displayed as a pill whose size is weighted by their effort. Sub cards with no effort get displayed as if they had an effort of 0.5.
• Hero Cards: Fixed wonky drag and drop behaviour within the sub card sidebar panel. Inaccessible cards are being shown as placeholders. This allows any user who has access to the Hero Card to change the order of sub cards even if inaccessible cards are present.
• Card content: We’ve stopped showing the $id portion when displaying card references within cards or comments.
• Text editor: Suggestion overlay won’t overflow the main screen.
• Search: Fixed race condition when clearing latest search query.
• Search/Auto-Complete: Don’t show cards of deleted or archived projects while searching or auto-completing via $. Don’t show cards of deselected projects while auto-completing via $.
• Trello importer: Massively improved performance for importing big boards. Instead of minutes it will now take a few seconds even for 1000+ tasks.

Hand v2 ready for beta-testing

After months of working on it and tuning the mechanics, we’re happy to announce that one of the biggest changes to Codecks reached its beta stage! ✨✨✨

The new hand aims to answer the question of what am I and my team members going to work on next? Every team member gets 7-28 hand slots (the exact number is configurable by you) to signal what their next cards are. You are able to inspect your co-worker’s hands and drag and drop cards into the right position as you see fit.
In addition we’re adding much more focus onto ongoing conversations, putting them right into your hand view.
The previous hand behaviour can now be accessed via “Bookmarks”.

You can go to “Organisation settings” > “Features” to activate it. You can move back to the classic hand any time. We eventually will be moving to the new hand for everyone. So if you have questions or concerns feel free to share.

We’ve also updated our Manual entry to give you an overview of the changes.


More improvement and fixes:

• Activity Feed: Added icons to make the different types of content easier to read.
• Daily Digest Mail: Migrated to new mail layout.
• Tags: Fixed issue with project tags containing special characters.
• Search: Increased width of search input and overlay.
• Settings: Added separate “Features” tab to toggle using Milestones, Journeys, Time tracking & the new hand
• Deck Overview: Fixed scroll issue when navigating from one deck to another below.

New header area for Open Deck pages

We’ve given your Open Decks a fresh look to make sure your page looks as nice as possible no matter what kind of assets you have available.

You are able to migrate manually from today! before we’ll apply the new layout to every open deck by 30.06.2021.

To migrate, head to your project settings and find the “Improved design available!” section.

Make opt out of conversation more explicit

Probably one of the better hidden functionalities within Codecks is now much more apparent: If you wan’t to leave a conversation, you no longer need to click your own avatar in the participant list. Instead we’re now offering a big “Opt out of conversation” button.

Notification refactor

Nothing changed on the outside, but we’ve rebuild our notification engine. When you perform an action like writing a comment, you don’t have to wait until all notifications are generated before the server responds and shows your comment. Instead notifications are now generated after it processed your request. This should speed up interactions in bigger teams quite a bit.

Improved performance for updating the deck of multiple cards

While we’re at the topic of performance optimizations: moving 100s of cards to a different deck could take several minutes. After some profiling we found the slow queries and could speed up the process considerably. It should now take ~1s per 100 cards moved.

Further improvement and fixes:

• Mails: Most mails got a design makeover.
• Discord Integration: Add 🐞 emoji as reaction for Decky.
• Card content: Don’t create personal tags when adding links containing #.
• Mini Cards: If a mini card is present multiple times (e.g. when ordering by tag), cursor navigation and auto-scroll behavior should do the right thing.
• Deck deletion: When deleting a deck that still has journey steps referencing it, we show a much clearer message.
• Esc handling: Has been reworked, so when e.g. bulk selecting and opening a panel, hitting esc multiple times should close ui elements in the right order.

Fixes and Improvements

• Card Properties: Card owner suggestions are more specific. It now prefers showing past assignments within the current deck rather than looking for past assignments within the whole organization.
• Open decks: Fixed an issue which caused an error when setting a public project back to private
• Infrastructure: We’ve consolidated all css-styling solutions evolving throughout the code base in the past 6 years(!) into a single one. This doesn’t have a major impact on how the app looks, but might lead to some performance improvements.

Improvement and fixes

• Scrolling: When scrolling to cards or decks it scrolls the least amount necessary to get the element into the screen.
• Infrastructure: Now shows the correct user IP when sending mails about changed passwords.
• Images: fixed showing images with faulty meta-information (mostly caused by certain Samsung phones).
• UI: fixed issue where elements haven’t been clickable due to a bug in the animation-library leaving a transparent overlay in the page sometimes.

Open Decks: Allow your audience to get updates into their inbox

We’ve added a “Get notified of updates” section to the header of each Open Decks page. This allows anyone to sign up via either Discord or email and password to then select whether they want to be notified daily or weekly if interesting updates are happening.

The digest email will contain links to new cards as well as cards that have been started or marked as done.

This feature is available to all regular Codecks users as well without having to create an additional sign up.
So feel free to check out the projects on open.codecks.io to see whether there’s some interesting projects you’d like to get updates for!

Wide Mode improvements

• Wide mode preference is now remembered when closing and opening cards.
• There’s an option in your profile which allows you to use both wide mode and side panel on wide browser windows (>=1440px).
• New position of wide mode button.

Further improvements and fixes

• Milestones: Moving a card into a deck with attached milestone, will automatically apply the decks’ milestone to the card.
• Card View: Using ctrl/cmd+click on a card’s id copies just the $id rather than the full URL. Useful for e.g. commit messages.
• Deck Library: Closing a deck scrolls the closed deck into view.
• Open Decks: Allow visitors to see archived cards.

Big shortcut overhaul

This release introduces a reworked shortcut system aimed to make keyboard-based navigation a lot more productive. Hit ? to see all shortcuts available on your current view.

Here’s some highlights:

• ctrl/cmd+a to select all cards
• b to select the card under the mouse cursor
• e, p, etc opens the corresponding property for the card under the mouse cursor
• Bulk selection actions now also all received shortcuts
• Return to open the edit view on an opened card
• Arrow Keys to navigate across the mini cards

More improvements and fixes

• Property panel now has same width as other panels, leading to less reflows when navigating through different side panels.
• Fix drag and drop issue within journey steps.
• Input for changing milestone’s date now uses proper date picker
• Open deck portal now shows random projects at bottom (with the ability to load more).