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!