Changelog

2024 has been our biggest year at Codecks so far—and, as such, we wanted to make sure we’d end it with a bang!

In case you missed it: we recently reached a total of €1m in funding, thanks to a significant EU grant, which will allow us to deliver even more exciting features, at an even faster pace. With that in mind, 2025 promises to be huge… but 2024 isn’t over yet. 

To finish the year in style (quite literally, in this case), we’re happy to introduce you to our newest release, which includes: Card Cover updates, which will allow you to customize your Cards and Decks more than ever, Time Tracking improvements, and more. Have a look below!  

Card Covers

As you know, with our tool we’re on an eternal quest to make project management more playful, fun and efficient. An important component of that is adding ways in which you can beautify your Codecks to look as amazing as the art in your game.

Our new updates to Card Covers are a big step towards that. Here are a couple new features this release brings that will make your cards look even nicer:

• Cover Images on Open Cards: You can now add and view cover images directly on open cards, enhancing their visual appeal and clarity.
• An image button allows you to directly open the cover image settings and lay them out perfectly on the card.
• We reworked the behavior for hero card cover images to have priority for all sub cards. This makes sure that you have a nice image across all sub cards as well.
• While working on the cover images, we moved the Hero bar to hover above the opened card. This leaves more room for seeing your new nice cover images on the card.
• We also enabled animated cards and golden bars for all users.

Time Tracking Improvements

Our real-time tracking option was tied to the state of the card, which resulted in a few side effects:

• You couldn’t leave a card started while not actively working on it. That prevented marking multiple cards in-progress and removed a way to easily see which cards were already started VS seeing which cards hadn’t been worked on so far.
• While in blocking or review state, you couldn’t real-time track additional time spent working on the card.
• People that weren’t the owner could only use the bulk time editing feature in the history sidebar, but couldn’t use the real-time tracking widget to add time to a card.

Now, we’re fixing all of these gaps by promoting time tracking to its own button! You’re now free to real-time track time on a card, independent of its current state or ownership! We also added some automation, like setting the card to started when the owner tracks time for the first time, which will make migration easier and consistent with old behavior. 

This will also affect snoozing behaviour. Previously, a card went into a purple snoozing state when the tracker stopped automatically after a certain amount of hours. With this new release this wouldn’t work anymore if you’re tracking a card in review, for example, so we re-instated the same snoozing behavior we use when time tracking is disabled: cards with no activity in 72 hours (customizable in your org settings) will snooze. Any activity (making a comment, changing content…) will unsnooze it.

Run Chart Enhancements

We love our run charts (found in the sidebar of your runs), and we’re making them even better with several improvements:

• The run chart now features a burn up projection line to let you know how close you are to the ideal work rate in your run.
• Cards in Review are now shown as part of the chart to give you a better idea how many cards are “almost” done VS done cards.
• Sprint charts now use the same effort calculation as the total effort summary, including hero cards with their own set effort values.
• We improved how time tracked is attributed to runs. Now when tracking time on a card in the next run, the time will still be attributed to the current run instead of the next run.

Other Improvements

That’s not all! Here are couple of additional improvements that you will find in this release:

• Streamlined Conversations: We’ve redesigned the conversation flow, drawing inspiration from our Guardians feature. The wording around opting out of reviews has been changed to the idea of “approving” work, representing our best practices about how to use reviews more clearly.
• Text Editor Improvements: Handling images in the text editor is smoother, allowing easier cursor movement above or below images.
• Checkbox Checks: Cards with unchecked checkboxes now ask for confirmation before being marked as done.
• Tag Descriptions in Table View: We recently added the option to add usage descriptions to tags. These descriptions are now also supported when using table mode.
• Guardian Badge: Decks with guardians now display a guardian badge in the deck overview.
• Education Plan Application: We offer Codecks for free for educational usage, and we now added a simple form to streamline the process for applying and approving for these educational accounts.
• Calendar Days: Weekdays will now show in the calendar too. 
• Hero Adjustments: Hero Cards can now be placed in their owner’s done pile, like normal task cards.
• Search Improvements: We’ve added the option to search for cards in someone’s hand or not in hand.

Fixes

• Hand Assignments: Adding a card to the hand and assigning it to someone else will no longer reassign it. The card will stay in the correct hand and retain the original owner.
• Timeline Scroll Fix: Fixed scrolling issues when initially opening the timeline view.
• Journey Step Editing: Opened journey steps and card templates now feature an edit button, even if the “Quick Edit” setting is disabled. Focus Mode will now respect the Quick Edit User Setting introduced last release.
• Improved Suggestions in Editor: When using @ or # in the editor, suggestions now prioritize matches at the beginning of user or tag names.
• Beast Token Adjustment: Doc cards no longer display beast tokens.

Uff, and that’s it! Our last release of 2024!

We want to use this opportunity to thank you for being part of the Codecks journey, and for letting us be part of your journey, too! We’re thrilled to bring you these updates and can’t wait to show you what’s in store for 2025. Until then… have a happy holiday season, for those celebrating it, and see you next year!

Beast Cards

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:

• To start tracking Beast Levels for Card, enable Beast Mode for the respective Run. This will track completion and level up the Beast Level for any Card that remains undone at the end of the Run, or is moved out during its duration.
• You can automatically enable Beast Mode after a preset amount of time. This allows your team to have a planning phase to finalize the scope of the Run before committing to the contained Cards.
• Cards added during a Run receive a ‘NEW’ marker. This helps you track scope changes during your Run. While a Card displays this NEW marker, it can still be moved away from the Run without increasing its Beast level. You can customize the length of this grace period in the Beast Mode settings. Once the grace period has passed, the NEW marker is removed, and the Card is considered as committed to being done within this Run, similar to any Card added earlier.

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.

More Run Updates

• Set an explicit Start Date: You can now pick a future start date when setting up new Runs, instead of having to start them within the next week.
• User Capacities: When editing a user’s capacity, a Tooltip will now show a historic workload for that user.
• Stats: The time tracking summary will include only time tracking entries that happened within that Run. So if a Card was started in Run A and later moved to Run B, Run A’s stats will now include the stats for that Card.
• Stat Overview: We’ve extended this sidebar’s functionality by using the Run’s stats at the time it ended where available. We’ve also added hover interactions showing precise numbers for the priority and owner bars. Opening that sidebar now also jumps to the currently running Run.

Further Improvements

• Tag Descriptions: We added the ability to add descriptions to Project Tags, allowing you to document their usage more easily. We also reworked the tag editor to be more user-friendly.
• Conversations: We’ve added new slash commands to conversations to quickly comment and then opt out, close, or finish a review in just one step and without using the mouse.
• Dragging Cards: We improved the look and feel for empty drop zones, making interactions more intuitive.
• Journeys: The Journey Editor now opens in an overlay, streamlining the editing experience.
• Hand: Hero Cards can now be added to your Hand.
• Timeline: Should now be much less jumpy when opening another Run or Milestone
• User Profile: Added option “Enable Quick Edit”. Disabling it prevents opening the edit view when clicking on the card content.

Fixes

• Milestone & Run Stats: Fixed an issue with time zones east of GMT showing data from the wrong day.
• Authentication: Fixed issues with Google and Discord authentication on Safari.

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.

🔍 New Sidebar Behavior

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:

• More Space: With the sidebars no longer cramping the content behind them, we’ve widened them, giving you more room for your conversations and attachments.
• Less Distraction: Dive deep into specific card details without those background cards begging for attention.
• Minimal Card Reshuffling: We’ve been on a quest to reduce disorienting card layout reshuffling, and this change is a big step forward, complementing our previous side panel improvements.

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!

✨ Journey Updates

Journeys just got a turbo boost!

• Customizable Steps: Now, when you trigger a journey, you’ll see a screen that lets you pick and choose exactly which steps to create.
• Organized Zones: Group your journey steps into tidy sections.
• Shortcuts Galore: Enjoy the same handy card shortcuts as in other parts of Codecks.

This opens up all sorts of new possibilities, like:

• Only creating the cards you need for pre-production, and saving the rest for later.
• Recreating specific journey steps as needed.
• Grouping similar asset types and customizing workflows for each.

Journeys have always been magical, and now they’re even better!

🏃 Run Updates

Our Run feature has been leveling up with these handy new options:

• Auto-Update Pinned Runs: Your pinned Run will now automatically roll over to the next one when it’s done.
• Auto-Assign Cards: There’s a new option to automatically assign started cards to the pinned Run.
• Set Finish Time: Now you can specify the exact time and timezone for your Run’s finish.
• Preserve Run Stats: When a Run ends, we now lock in those valuable stats, giving you more reliable insights into your team’s progress, so that you can rearrange the cards without worrying about losing process information.
• Improved Run Overview: The updated overview panel now shows not just milestones, but also your Run performances on a vertical timeline.

🎨 Usability Improvements

• Add-Card Button: We’ve slimmed down the add-card shortcut and moved it into the swimlane for a cleaner look, plus we’re using a new add-card icon throughout the app.
• Swimlane Makeover: While we were at it, we gave the swimlane design a refresh. Zones are now accompanied by our fancy zone icon too.
• Activity Feed: We’ve reworked the feed for better readability, and similar entries are now neatly bundled together.
• User Management: Your user settings just got a visual upgrade.

🔧 Further Improvements and Fixes

• Improved drag and drop When re-sorting cards within your Hand or your Zones, we introduced a new approach for previewing the new order while you’re dragging the card(s) that avoids reshuffling cards.
• Triaging: Navigating cards with the keyboard got easier! Now, when a card moves, your next/previous navigation keys will remember its old spot, making flowing through your triage session a breeze.
• Bulk Selection Bar: Tooltips now show shortcuts, making your life a little easier.
• Activity Feed: Zone changes are now tracked in the feed, so nothing slips through the cracks.
• Zones: Click on a Zone label to filter and view only that Zone’s cards.
• Open Card: Use Shift+S to quickly set a Hero card for the one you’ve got open.
• Notifications: Bulk notifications are now safe to dismiss without affecting other alerts.
• Card Creation: You can now reference uploaded images with ! 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. 🚀

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!