Changelog

2023 is wrapping up, but we couldn’t let the year end without another major Codecks update! This is our 8th major release this year.

Hero Cards

Since their introduction in 2020 Hero cards have become a core component of Codecks and with we’re looking to make them even easier to handle.

• Our own game dev team at Maschinen-Mensch has grown to over 20 people (🤯) and we’re seeing hero cards with dozens of sub cards now. With so much going on, it can feel a bit overwhelming. To help manage these, we’ve experimented with different approaches and have found one that works great. From the sub card sidebar you can now group sub cards by different dimensions (Priority, Deck, Owner and Milestone) in addition to being able to lay them out manually as before. Of course, drag’n’drop and quick-add functionality is fully supported. This will let you see at a glance how many sub cards of a hero card were done in each milestone, or how the effort is distributed across different people or work areas.
• When creating a new card, you can select its hero card right away without having to save the card first.
• The hero badge shown on top of an opened card now shows the overall hero card progress bar too.
• We added the hero card ID and title to the time tracking report.

Info Sidebar

We have a new global sidebar design which aims to improve two challenges:

• Opening and closing a card results in a ‘reshuffling’ effect, leading to cards changing their position. This can be a bit disorienting.
• As teams grow, the amount of decks and internal team culture on how to use these get more complex. We already have support for deck and milestone descriptions, but they were a bit too hidden for easy discovery.

The info toggle (right below the add-card button) lets you enable an info sidebar that is always shown when no card is currently opened. This reduces the occurrence of card reshuffling dramatically.

We use that space now to prominently display your beautiful milestone or deck description text. Use this area for nice lore text, rallying cries for your release milestone, or to document how this deck or milestone should be used by the team.

Additionally, we’ll show you a quick overview for all the cards in this context. And if you’re looking at a milestone, we even show you the card count progression over time.

Playfulness

We worked towards making Codecks even more playful and appealing to look at:

• To reduce the amount of icons shown on cards, we’re now using a striped card color instead of showing the archive icon on the mini card. It looks nicer and reduces icon clutter. Win/Win!
• When setting a card to done, we now show an animated effect on the card. (If you hate these, you can disable them in your user profile)
• On noisy card images, the icons on mini cards can be hard to read sometimes. To help with that, we’re gradually blurring the lower part of card images now.

More

• To celebrate the work that you’re doing with Codecks, we’re sending out weekly email summaries to Codecks admins to show you the amount of completed card, time tracked and other useful team information. We’re merging this email with the one that you previously received for the visitor stats of your open decks. Make sure to check the ‘emails’ section of your user profile to see which types of email updates you currently have enabled.
• We’ve reworked the Hand Sync feature UX to prevent activating it accidentally.

Decky

Our trusty Decky bot is great for collecting feedback and bug reports from your own Discord community.

• Discord has taken measures to prevent other parties from linking to images uploaded on a server starting this December. This means that all images uploaded to Decky will now also be automatically uploaded to Codecks, so that we can host that file indefinitely for you. All previously uploaded files have been moved to Codecks’s storage as well. These files will be counted towards your file-quota. Big files can be deleted and identified using the Media Library in the Mission Control. You can limit the size of the files that your community members can upload in the “Basic Settings” form for a slash command.
• Support for showing a user’s global name.
• Fixed issue with notifications not being sent if multiple target channels were picked.
• Fixed issue that replies within threads would not show within card embeds.

Steamy

We recently released a huge update for our free Steamy bot. Steamy allows you to post any new reviews of one or multiple Steam games to your discord server. This is great for showing your appreciation for good reviews and motivating your community to leave more.

All non-English reviews are now automatically translated to English for your convenience. Also, the bot now supports posting weekly summaries which shows how reviews have affected your overall rating in this week. To add Steamy to your discord server, simply navigate to this page: Install Steam Bot

Fixes

• Fix attachment title edit during card creation.
• Fix shortcut issue with media keys opening the upvote dashboard.
• Fix issue with skipping rows when navigating cards via arrow keys.
• Fix issue with backspace key deleting too much on Android in the text editor.
• Relative links (i.e. links starting with /) in cards or descriptions no longer open a new tab.

Codecks Conf

We want to a moment to thank the participants of our first intimate Codecks Conf in November! We had a blast and hope to make this a recurring event. As a special treat, we showed some upcoming ideas and concepts that we’re currently investigating and even held a (totally not statistically representative) vote on which of these excited the participants the most.

The clear winner was our idea for a new vision tab, which allows you to create a type of skill tree for your game project. You can freely lay out the most important aspects of your game in a one-page format, allowing you to have a quick grasp of its overall progress.

We’ve already started implementation on this new big feature, and we’re excited to share more about it in the new year. This will literally be a game changer.

Thank you!

Thanks for everybody that supported us in 2023! We’re still a tiny team taking on the outdated juggernauts of the industry with the mission to create a better alternative for creative teams that need easy-to-understand, yet powerful tools.

If you want to help us on our quest, the best thing to do is to spread the word! We don’t have a marketing department, so we need your help to let the world know about Codecks. :)

Wishing you happy holidays and see you in 2024!

Table View

We love cards! But when you’re dealing with large decks containing several hundred cards (your bug deck 😭) sometimes a super-streamlined view that allows you to quickly scan lots of cards would be nice. That’s why we’re introducing Table View for our Pro Plan!

Find the new view option in the sort panel to the left. The table view supports all the swimlanes and drag’n’drop feature that you already love. Using the ⭐ button you can also set this view as the default view for decks.

This has been suggested on our lovely discord server by Junuh and Wattosan. Thank you!

Refer a Friend

We’re still a small scrappy startup taking on the old boring behemoths in the market. If you want to help us and share Codecks with your friends or colleagues, you can go to your organization settings and look for the “Refer a friend” section. Your friends will benefit from an awesome 10% discount for the first year.

Bug fixes & Improvements

• Card Sorting: Saving default card order now also considers secondary ordering as well as compact mode (and table view).
• Card Sorting: Allow to reverse the milestones sort order (Suggested by saragtd).
• Shortcuts: Hovering over the effort or priority icons and typing a number now also works for opened cards again.
• Deck Overview: Added organization setting to prevent completed cards from being considered in a deck’s card count.
• Milestone Picker: When opening the milestone picker via bulk select or hovering a card and pressing m, the shown milestones will be filtered by the project the card belongs to.
• Invite Links: Producers get read-only access to invite links.
• Clone Project: Improved handling for re-using milestones in the target project (Reported by mjeno).
• Discord: The setting to add a role to a thread now checks for the relevant permissions.
• New Shortcut: Use alt-p to start or stop the current timer. (Suggested by Marek)
• Focus Mode: Clicking on a card reference in focus mode, opens this card in focus mode. (Suggested by HappyPorcupine)
• Deck Overview: Fixed an issue where deck stats sometimes were not updated (Discoverd by mjeno).
• Due Dates: Due due dates were not colored correctly. (Reported by lunar_penguin)

You ask, we deliver! Most of these new features in this release are the direct result of conversations with our discord community. 💜

🚀 Card Quick Settings

The new Quick Settings panel allows you to change multiple card properties with just a few keystrokes. Trigger it by simply clicking the effort icon on any card and use the arrow keys to effortlessly update priority, effort, deck, milestone, or owner of a card.

Pending changes will be marked with a dot next to the property tab. Pressing return will commit your changes to the card. Pressing Esc closes the panel without any changes.

Oh, and you can even trigger this panel directly while writing card text by using the /slash command “Set Card Properties”.

Order by Hero Card

A lot of Codecks users rely heavily on hero cards. We love them too! That’s why we’re improving workflows around hero cards by adding a new dedicated sorting order, which allows you to group cards by their hero card. 🤩

Deck Depth

We have given the deck overview a remarkable face lift. Leaning even more into our playful card metaphor, decks will now have a depth depending on how many cards they contain.

This depth is taking completed and uncompleted cards into account. Also, the number of done cards within a deck is now proudly shown on the deck cover to help you understand where you’ve already made a lot of progress. The deck depth itself is rendered in two different shades to show the ratio between done and undone cards too.

And we’re finally adding a fan-favorite feature request.. drumroll you can now override the deck colors manually from the deck settings!

Invite Link

In addition to inviting team members via email, you can now also use a convenient invite link for your team. These can be created by organization admins from the user management screen.

Further Improvements and Fixes

• Open Decks: Preferred card order is now shown as expected.
• Focus Mode: Allow to use Enter to edit text as well.
• Mini Card: We made the highlight for currently opened card more noticable by giving it a additional border.
• Opened Card: Fix shortcuts for the prop panel, like e or p for editing effort and priority.
• Deck Counter: Card count now gets correctly updated in case an action leads to zero card within a deck.
• Notification Mails: Fixed link in footer to point to correct place.

Redesigned Text Editor

In our quest to enhance your writing experience, we’ve
completely rewritten our text editor. This allows us to bring you a bouquet of new features.

Our smarter completions for lists or block quotes will save you time, and the ability to indent with tab / shift + tab makes structuring your thoughts a lot easier. The new monospaced font offers more clarity in recognizing indentation levels, too. We’ve also added slash commands (type /) and a floating action bar, to make our editor and markdown features more discoverable.

Introducing Focus Mode

When crafting, reading, or editing your cards, why not do so without distractions? With our new full screen Focus Mode, that’s exactly what you can do. To make room for the new focus button on top of cards, we’ve shifted the card Id button to the lower left corner. Enjoy a zen-like experience as you work on your cards.

Onboarding Experience for Admins

Previously, the onboarding progress was associated solely with an organization and was only visible to the organization’s owner. Now admins can also participate in most onboarding steps, making the process more inclusive. A cherry on top - if you complete onboarding steps in one organization, they will count as completed in other organizations too!

Bug Fixes and Improvements

To ensure you have a seamless experience, we’ve made several key improvements:

• General: We’ve tamed our scroll animations - they are now limited to a maximum of 300ms, making jumps to cards deep within a deck much quicker.
• Journeys: You can empty the template cards again.
• Journeys: We’ve brought back the dependency buttons to your journey steps.
• Open Card: No more unnecessary “Open” button next to the deck picker if the card is already opened in that deck.
• Open Card: Clicking the Crown icon on a sub card now dutifully opens the parent card again.
• Open Card: You can once again open the attachment viewer directly by clicking on an attachment embedded in the card content.
• Shortcuts: Fixed the alt+x shortcut to promptly dismiss conversation notifications for an opened card.
• Slack & Discord Integration: Milestone updates will now display the new values, not the old ones, making tracking progress easier.
• Calendar: Resolved a pesky timezone-dependent issue when selecting a date in the calendar to create a milestone.
• Android: Oh, and no more falling back to a plain text field on Android phones!

Enjoy these updates and let us know your thoughts. Your feedback fuels our improvements.

Can never get the card editor size perfect on your screen? Regular mode is too small, wide mode too wide? Now you can freely resize the card editor!

We have spent the last weeks completely revamping our whole text editor. The resizable window is just a first glimpse at the new capabilities that we’ll be sharing very soon cough focus mode cough.

Here are all the changes for this release:

Flexible Wide Mode

You can now drag the container for an opened a card (or journey step) to your preferred width. 🤯 This width is remembered on your browser, so you can use different settings if you use Codecks across multiple computers with different displays.

New Deck Button

We’ve improved the design of the buttons surrounding opened cards. Most importantly, we’ve unified the deck selection flow across card-editing and new-cards. The new deck selector will give quick access to recently used decks and allows you to jump to the full deck picker.

Other improvement and Fixes

• Text Editor Pressing ! opens a grid rather than a list. This allows for more and bigger images being shown.
• Text Editor When in preview mode, hitting esc goes back to edit mode rather than canceling the edit process.
• Card content To edit the label of a checkbox item, you can ctrl/cmd + click to jump to move the selection to the correct line.
• Decky Show correct ‘created at’ date for Discord based Card Embeds.
• Milestone Tooltip Stats are now shown as effort or card count based, depending on the previous release’s milestone overview.
• Pinned Milestone Area Card created via the add buttons at the end of the zones will now get the correct milestone.

If you reaaally want to know

• Auto-me Filter Is not active by default anymore for new accounts. Codecks now specifically states when activating the filter in a big deck or milestone, so that it is less confusing regarding what just happened. Also fixed a bug where sometimes it would only be applied the second time a deck was visited
• Observers Removed some redundant buttons that were actually not usable by people on the free observer role.
• User Reports Errors do not return with status 200 anymore
• Swimlanes When sorting by workflow state, the “Doc” swimlane now works with drag and drop
• Manual order Fixed rare crash when applying new order within a zone
• Card Creation Fixed issue when uploading attachments
• Open Decks Fix a crash when the activity feed was showing a milestone that was not associated with any public deck

Milestone Overview

The calendar has gotten a big extension! It now offers an “Overview” button which allows you to inspect and compare high level stats over all your milestones.

You can reach the calendar via the expand icon at the top right of the timeline within the Milestones tab.

The overview offers to either use card count or effort as your metric. You’ll find the distribution of completed vs uncompleted work across priorities and owners.

This will be a big assistance in making milestones more comparable and thus more plannable.

New Onboarding System

To give new as well as existing users a chance to learn about the breadth of features, we’ve added a new onboarding system. Every organization owner has access to currently 70 steps divided into 16 chapters.

To make it more digestible we’ve included a small playful XP and level up mechanic. You can access it via the blue shield icon in the top right.

The progress for existing organizations has been mostly pre-filled so you don’t have to redo steps you know about already.

To be clear, this is just the first version we’re putting out to get some early feedback from you. So if you have suggestions please let us know either via Discord or per Mail!

More Fixes and Improvements

• Card View: Quick Add option at the end of each swim lane when ordering by owner, priority, effort, tag, deck or milestone.
• Zones: Added a drop sidebar to avoid scrolling if there’s a lot of zones.
• Milestones Timeline: Shows the next and previous milestones outside of the visible range.
• Card Picker: UI elements that allow you to search and pick a card, now also accept entering a card id.
• Bug Fix: Fixed some cards becoming invisible on Chrome
• Login Form: First taste of the new design system.
• Decky: increased upload limit for attachments in Discord messages from 10MB to whatever your server’s limit is.
• Time Tracking Reports: CSV export now includes project name and id.
• Decky & User Reports: Journey templates are applied to cards created via Decky and User Reports as well. This allows to e.g. auto-assign cards to a user created via Decky.

Hold onto your hats folks! We’re back from GDC and we bring you some exciting changes to Codecks!

Import CSV

We’ve made it easier than ever to jump onboard with our new CSV import functionality. Say goodbye to the headaches of switching between project management tools, because now you can import your projects straight from any tool that supports CSV exporting. You may of course also access our existing Trello and HacknPlan import tools.

And there’s more! Re-import a CSV that is based on an export of your Codecks cards, to update the data of these cards in place. This could be used to perform complex updates using spreadsheets.

The CSV Importer can be found in the Organization Settings. Make sure to check our Manual to learn more.

Easier Sign-up

Now you can create a Codecks account using your Discord or Google login. No more wracking your brains to remember another set of login details - hooray!

Help Center

We added a new help center section. Just click on the question mark icon next to the milestones tab in the header, and you’ll be whisked away to a wonderland of information. We’re talking manuals, our Discord community, status page, and more. It’s like a treasure trove of knowledge!

Discord Improvements

• You can now modify karma point amounts for each slash command.
• We’ve fixed the pesky issue of images not loading in project notification messages. Phew!

Usability Improvements

• We’ve improved the dialogue for adding sub cards from the sidebar. If you are using our inbox feature, we now show you deck recommendations based on the location of the hero card and your inbox settings.
• Time tracking info now not only shows you individual time entries per person, but also the sum of all user’s time spent on the card. You can see this when hovering over the timer icon on any card and also in the history sidebar.
• We improved the design of the drag area within a deck or milestone. When dragging a card to one of the drop targets, the card now shrinks down in size to make it easier to see where you are releasing the card.
• When deleting cards, we display the names of affected cards in the dialogue.
• Zones now feature a quick-add button that allows to quickly add a card to the correct zone. No need to move the card to the correct zone after creation anymore.
• The “Start journey” button is smarter now. It only adds those steps that are not already present as sub cards.
• The image picker popping up when hitting ! in the card editor or comment section now shows more and bigger images.

Bug fixes

• Can’t start journeys for Doc cards anymore.
• Fix ctrl/cmd+a for selecting all cards. It did not work as expected in some contexts.
• Prevent dropping cards into owner lanes if owners don’t have access to that card.
• Fix upload limitations for bigger files.
• Fix crash when jumping from one journey step to the next while the property panel was open.

So, what are you waiting for? It’s easier than ever to get on board with Codecks. See for yourself how magical project management can be! 🤩

Happy new year, dear Codecks users! We’re excited to see the games and projects you’ll be releasing in 2023. To help you with that, we have a biiig update ready for you to use.

Organize cards with Zones

When you have a lot of cards inside a milestone or deck, it can be hard to maintain a clear overview, even with the various sorting options that are already available. In this release, we’re adding “Zones”: they are custom card groups that you can add when you’re in the “Manual” sorting order. Zones are shared across the whole team.

A couple of example uses:

• Separate the cards inside your milestone by work area or teams (e.g. Feature Team 1, Feature Team 2)
• Separate the cards inside your knowledge deck by type without resorting to tags (e.g. Engine Docs, Business Info)
• Separate cards by additional priority levels (e.g. Do first, Must Have, Regular, Nice to have, Cut Candidate, Postponed)

There are lots of other possible applications for this, and we’re curious to see what you’ll come up with. Let us know your favorite use case on our Discord server!

Zones can be managed by Owner, Admin, Producers and Staff users with Full permissions.

Quicker access to your Milestone

The new Pinned Milestone section in the Hand tab shows all cards assigned to you in the currently pinned milestone. This allows to see your upcoming milestone work without having to leave the Hand.

You can also easily drag’n’drop cards directly into the Your Hand area or reorder the cards as needed. Zones are supported here as well. The order will also be mirrored in the full Milestone view.

Streaks

We plan to make Codecks even more playful in the future. In this update, we’re adding a new streak system to your done pile in the Your Hand area. Mark any of your cards as done during a week, and your streak counter will increase by one.

If you’re on the Plus or Pro plan, we automatically freeze your streak for you, and it is never reset to zero.

Hover over the flame to see your previous best streak. The counter will also be featured on your Open Decks page.

Decky Karma

Submitting good feedback via our Discord Decky integration will now award you with Karma points and additional roles. Gain 1 point for each upvote reaction to your feedback, and 10 points for each feedback that gets marked as “done” by the developer.

Your karma is displayed next to your submitted feedback and can also be shown with new /karma slash-command. As a reward, server admins may auto-assign custom roles to contributors that reach a certain Karma threshold.

Additionally, we’re adding the following features to Decky:

• Decky can now auto-add members of a specified role to newly created threads. You can find the setting for this in the Workflow state updates section of a command. Use this to auto-add your server moderators to new feedback threads.
• Users reacting to a Decky feedback will automatically be added to the thread. This means that they will also be notified of follow-up information about the feedback that they are interested in.

Further improvements

• Huge performance improvements for screens with a lot of decks or cards. Previously, opening a deck with hundreds of cards could result in up to 3 seconds delay. They now open in a fraction of time through our new smart loading technique.
• Hand section area now auto-collapses to be more readable on narrow window sizes.
• Admins and Producers may change the time tracking entries of other members.
• Fixed an issue that starting a card would sometimes not add it to Your Hand.
• Fixed an issue when setting user access within the project’s user access settings.
• Fixed issue with searching sometimes resulting in internal server error.
• Doc cards get a different color in the Deuter-enhanced color palette.
• Set maximum notification count to 10 per category to accommodate for smaller screens.
• The Codecks Manual received a face lift (and now contains a choose-your-own-adventure, where you try to defeat the mighty card witch).

We’re looking for an Online Marketing Intern

Are you a student based in Germany? Here’s an opportunity to work with us!