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!