More Power to Producers

Hi, and welcome to our new release! After Oops! We Improved It Again, we now bring you… More Power to Producers, our second of many releases of 2025.

One of our themes for this year is (as you might’ve guessed) to give more power to producers, so they can best help their teams succeed in Codecks. With that in mind, in this release we focused on a lot of ease-of-use improvements that remove some of the busy work, so you can focus more on the things that are important. We hope you like it!

Deck Types

As you know, Codecks is very flexible in how you can use it. We’ve built the tool like that because we know every team is different, and we want to give you lots of options for modeling your work.

Many of you follow our own recommended setup: dedicated decks for Hero cards (organized by player-facing assets like levels, enemies, weapons) and separate decks for tasks (organized by departments like coding, art, writing, etc).

To help with the busy work of maintaining such a structure, we’ve added some automation:

• Deck Type Restrictions: You can now limit decks by card type (Task, Hero, or Doc). Cards created in these specialized decks automatically convert to the appropriate type—creating a card inside a Hero-only deck will turn it into a Hero card, even if it has zero sub cards. Similarly, cards in doc decks automatically become doc cards.

• Visual Indicators: Hero-only and Doc-only decks show special icons next to their names in both the deck list and overview, making your structure instantly recognizable.

• Smart Space Templates: When creating a space, you can pick from predefined templates (GDD, Tasks, Docs). Previously this choice was only informal, but now these spaces actually influence the default settings for contained decks. For example, creating a new deck inside a GDD space will automatically limit it to hero cards only. You can still customize this on a per-deck level.

• Intelligent Defaults: Each deck type comes with optimized default views. For instance, task decks now have table view enabled by default.

And speaking of table view: we’ve decided it has become such a fundamental feature of Codecks that we’ve promoted it from Pro-only to available for everyone!

Improved Run Support

We’ve completely reworked how pinned runs work, making the process more powerful and easier to use:

• Auto-detection of Active Runs: You don’t need to manually pin runs anymore! Codecks now automatically detects which active run you’re participating in and shows it in your hand tab.

• Multiple Run Support: Working in several runs at once? For the first time, the runs section in your hand will show all the runs you’re part of simultaneously. No more need to decide which run to prioritize or manually switch between them.

• Organization-wide Settings: The options to auto-assign started and new cards to a current sprint are now moved to the Sync Settings option. These settings now apply to everyone in your organization, not just to yourself. This aligns with our goal of helping producers set up the best environment for their team.

• Timeline Improvements: Clicking the Timeline tab now opens your last viewed Run (or your last milestone if no Runs are active).

Emoji Reactions

Have you ever felt like closing a review thread without commenting feels a bit… awkward? We’ve seen lots of people drop quick emojis as confirmation or appreciation, but this had a couple of annoyances: it’s not always convenient having to use the keyboard for selecting a smiley, and you can only do it while you’re part of the conversation.

Which is why we’ve taken a page from other tools and added emoji reactions to conversation messages:

• Quick Reactions: Hover over any comment to choose an emoji with your mouse. You can use one of your recently used emojis or open the full emoji picker to find that perfect one.

• No Thread Joining Required: You don’t have to be part of the conversation to react. Left without saying “thank you”? Just drop an emoji without having to re-enter the thread. See something interesting in a thread you weren’t part of? Add an emoji without having to join and then leave again.

We’re sure this will make your conversations not only more seamless but also help you add some of your own flavor to your interactions on Codecks.

More Improvements

• Video Support: Use ! in card content to select not just attached images, but also videos. You can also paste via Ctrl/Cmd + V into the card editor. Note that file limits still apply: 10MB for free plans and 250MB for paid plans. We’re also relying on the browser’s native video player support, so not all video files might work on all devices.

• Deck References: Just like you can create handy card references by typing $, you can now also create links to decks by typing $$.

• Better Time Tracking Icons: New time tracking icons on cards give a better intuition of how much time has been tracked.

• Auto-focused Time Entry: The input field is now automatically focused when adding manual time tracking entries.

Fixes & Optimizations

• Performance Improvements: Fixed performance of the time tracking icon (the stopwatch on opened cards). Browsers don’t seem to like continuous animations, even small ones, so we’re now animating it once per second.

• Crash Fixes: Fixed a crash when creating a card into someone’s hand when the target deck had hand sync active.

• Admin Access: Fixed a crash when non-admins try to inspect the Billing page.

That’s it for this update! We hope these changes make your Codecks experience smoother. As always, let us know what you think—your feedback helps us make better updates in the future.

And speaking of updates, we have one final thing to share: The recording of our first webinar! Last week, we did our first webinar to unveil some of the things we’re working on for this year: upcoming features, our plans and ideas, and more. If you were there, this release won’t be a surprise, as we talked about it there. If you weren’t, don’t worry: you can have a look at the recording now and learn more about everything we have planned for 2025! Thank you so much to everyone who attended, and we’ll have more news of other webinars soon!

And that’s it! As always: thank you for using Codecks, and we hope you enjoy this release! 

Happy game dev’ing! 🎮✨