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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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:
Workflow state updates
section of a command. Use this to auto-add your server moderators to new feedback threads.Are you a student based in Germany? Here’s an opportunity to work with us!
Every user can now set a default inbox deck: when creating a new card from the Hand or Milestones tab, this deck will be automatically pre-selected. You can pick your default inbox deck in the the top bar of an opened deck. Hovering over the button will also show you who else is currently using this deck as default inbox.
You might use this to default your cards towards a specific work deck that you tend to work in (e.g. the “Code” deck if you’re a programmer). Or you might use it to default your new cards towards a project inbox from where they are then moved into fitting decks.
Our goal is to make adding cards more convenient and less error-prone. Let us know what you think!
Milestones now support the “Manual” sorting order, which was previously restricted to decks only. We made this the default sort order for milestones.
In order to improve Codecks’ accessibility, we’re introducing three new workflow state color palettes for users with Protanopia, Protanomaly and Deuteranopia. They can be selected from Mission Control > Your Profile. This is a per-user setting.
We also made some slight adjustments to the default palette, most notably unassigned cards have a brighter color than before.
Status
to Workflow state
to be consistent.A couple of updates from teams using Codecks:
A lot of us are using Codecks to not only track tasks, but also game design documents and other reference material. With $-links and backlinks you can already build pretty complex wiki structures. To support this use case even more, we’re adding a new card type: Doc Cards.
Turn any card into a doc by clicking the new Doc icon on the bottom right side of an opened card (or use the bulk action bar to convert multiple cards in one step). A Doc Card is like a regular card but does not have workflow states, priority, or effort. This means no more accidentally setting document content to done and archiving it.
We’re currently conducting a lot of customer interviews to check in on how you use Codecks. One outcome has been that notifications can pile up a bit in certain situations. So we’re introducing a few changes:
watch
👁 button has moved from the history panel to the bottom right of the opened card.$
prefix) to open that card directly.As your team grows, you will need finer user access control options. This release features a big extension of user role management.
Staff
users access can now be limited to specific projects. The old Guest
role has been removed as Staff covers the same functionality now.Producer
role for specific projects. Producers may manage decks, milestones, project users and integrations. Think of this as a project-specific admin role. Producers are available on the Pro plan and can be added in a new section of the project settings called “User Access”.Admins
can now choose to limit the Staff role from creating and manage decks, milestones and journeys.Full Team
or Limited
. The Limited setting is available on the Pro plan. All organizations created before this release have access to this setting as well.Owner
role was introduced. There may only be one Owner and only they are able to close an organization.Here is an overview of the most important permission changes:
To learn more about the user management system please read our manual.
Staff
role have the same project access as before. Guests
have been automatically converted to the new Staff role.Admin
user who has been member of the organization for the longest has been turned into an Owner
.Limited
. All others have Full Team
access.Full Permissions
, meaning they can still manage decks, milestones and journeys like before.done
interaction..
as shortcut for bookmarking cards. This shortcut can be applied when hovering over a minicard, when looking at a opened card and when using the multi-select feature. To view a list of all available shortcuts in your current screen press ?
on your keyboard.-
,_
and .
$123
) followed by punctuation are now correctly recognised.This release introduces an easy way to get user feedback right from your game into Codecks! Thanks to automatic screenshots, savegame attachments and player text descriptions you can easily gather all the data that you need to fix those bugs or to analyze gameplay situations. Your players can optionally even leave their email and will automatically be notified by Codecks when you fix their issue.
For Unity games we’ve provided a ready-made asset which you can find on GitHub. It is also going to be available in the Unity Asset store as soon as the verification process is completed.
Non-Unity applications can use this feature as well by talking directly to the API. You can take a look at both the Manual Entry and the source code above to get started!
To set up user reports head to the Organization Settings and look for the User Report section. Here you’re able to add your applications and get your credentials. The settings also allow you to define in which deck cards should be created given their severity.
Since the integration is still in beta, we’d love to hear your opinions about it! You can share them on Discord or via email.
Congratulations to the teams behind these four games that launched on Steam in the past month:
This month’s update includes various improvements that we’re sure you will all appreciate.
We’ll be back in a few weeks with a big feature — a Unity integration!
Users on the Pro and Plus plans can now attach much bigger files to their cards: the file limit has been increased to 250MB (previously it was 25MB)
Additionally, the maximum file storage for Pro users has doubled to 10GB.
We made some adjustments to make searching through cards more efficient. The default search is now for “Content” which includes both the card’s content and the title. If you want to search only by title (excluding the content) use t:
as prefix.
You can see the full list of search filters by selecting the question mark icon once the search field has been expanded.
The Hacknplan importer we introduced in our previous update is now out of beta. We also added the option to skip importing closed boards.
The importer is available in your Organization Settings.
You’re now able to start a Pro subscription with a 1-month trial to try out all its features. You can cancel it anytime and will get a reminder email 7 days before the trial ends.
The trial can be activated from the Billing tab in the Organization Settings. Please note that only users with Admin role will be able to access this.
We’ve added a beta version of our HacknPlan importer. We’ve received an increased interest in people who wanted to switch over, so we’re making the process as simple as possible.
Here’s a list of features that are getting transferred to Codecks: project tags, attachments, owners (if they are present on Codecks), milestones, subtasks, user stories as hero cards, cover images, importance levels as priority, estimated cost as effort, due dates, dependencies.
The importer is available in your Organization Settings. Again, this is only accessible by users with Admin role.
The Trello importer has been around for a while, but we’ve just made some adjustments to it:
We’ve just updated the Showcase section on our website to include more amazing games made with Codecks: Nivalis, Tentacular, We Stay Behind, INDUSTRIA, Kraken Academy!!, Hell Pie. Go have a look!
We’re on a roll with our second update this month! Here’s a list of everything new:
ctrl / cmd + click
on a Milestone icon to open the corresponding milestone view! How did we manage to live without this for so long?We recently shared some news on our upcoming pricing plan changes via e-mail and through our social channels. Small reminder about that: upgrade to our Pro plan before June 1st to benefit from the current cheaper price point for a full year.
We also have some improvements for our lovely Decky Discord bot:
Important: if you’re still using the old version of Decky (the one using ”!” for commands), please make sure to migrate to the new Slash Command before June 30th: legacy Discord Commands and Card Creators features will stop working after this date. Selecting the “Migrate” button from the Discord Integration panel (under Organization Settings) will give you all the necessary information for a smooth and quick transition.
A quick news roundup from teams using Codecks:
This has been our number one feature request for quite some time, now it’s finally here: Due Dates! You can now assign individual due dates to any card to make sure that you never forget about a deadline again.
Due dates are fully integrated into various Codecks systems:
Find out more about Due Dates in the Manual or in this video:
Our sorting system has received some long-requested improvements to become truly stellar:
ctrl/cmd + click
to add additional sorting criteria and have more control of the exact sorting that you want to useAs before, your sorting preferences are stored on a deck and on a milestone level.
We’ve also created a manual entry and a video for you to enjoy:
1.5h
or 2 hours 20 mins
when entering custom times.The first version of Decky has been released almost 3 years ago. Since that time, Discord has added a lot of features: replies, threads and most recently slash commands. For our new update we’ve redesigned Decky to use the full power of Discord. We’ve also added new customization options and unique features. Our goal for Decky is to provide the best Discord community management experience in the world for both, you and your audience.
We’re on Product Hunt!
Product Hunt is like a reddit for tech products and we’ve submitted Decky there. If you have a Product Hunt account make sure to check it out and say hello! <3
Create Slash Commands via Decky
Rather than looking for pseudo commands like !bug
within messages, you can now create slash commands via the Decky Settings. Being a first-class citizen in the discord ecosystem, slash commands come with improved discoverability and UX for your audience compared to the old commands.
Thread support
Each feedback message created by your audience will automatically set up a dedicated thread. This helps keeping follow-up conversations tidy. Codecks automatically syncs the full conversation within your card, so once you’re ready to work on it, all the relevant information is already present.
Richer Status Updates
Both, the original message and the leaderboard entries can be annotated with progress updates. This way your audience gets automatically updated if you make relevant changes. By default these are “Threshold reached”, “Card started” and “Card done”. Pro users can also enable annotations for “Card seen”, “Assigned to dev”, “Assigned to milestone” and “Moved to hand” to provide your audience with even more real-time insights. When the card status changes you may now send message updates to a channel or the specific thread.
And there’s more
/leaderboards
slash command: allowing you and your audience to see a private leaderboard for the time frame of your choice.Decky’s new Slash commands cover all the functionality of the previous Discord Commands and Card Creators. We’re also realizing that Discord pushes its bot eco system to move towards slash commands and its interactions via recent API changes.
We’ve therefore made the decision to deprecate the previous interaction patterns. This means that legacy Commands an Card Creators will no longer be supported after June 30th, 2022.
While Card Creators are fairly trivial to replace with the new Slash Commands, we’ve provided a migration functionality for your commands. This ensures that feedback created with the old command can still be interacted with. If you have questions or concerns feel free to get in touch with us!
We’re excited for you to try this new version and let us know your feedback!
Our Discord bot Decky is now installed on more than 1,000 servers and has processed over 100,000 upvotes. For the start of 2022 we’re setting out to make Decky even better. We want to make it the BEST tool for tracking your Discord community feedback in a playful and efficient way. To reach that goal we’re making some big improvements.
The first thing we noticed is that leader boards can grow stale, which defeats their purpose. That’s why we’re adding new sorting options that allow you to sort leader boards by recent upvotes, instead of overall upvotes. This will shift the focus of leader boards towards what’s going on right now, similar to how Reddit works. While we were at it, we also reworked their appearance to be more readable.
This is just the first change of more that will be happening in the next couple of weeks.
Find out more about Decky in the Manual.
The latest Codecks update is now live — here’s what changed!
Codecks gives you great project tracking, making sure that your production ship sails fast. Feedback from your community makes sure that your production is not only fast but also working towards the right direction. That’s what makes community building so instrumental for a lot of us.
We believe that combining project management and community building is the next step for modern teams:
You can enable upvotes for your team or the community within the project settings:
Find out more about Open Decks on the Manual.
We’ve reworked our subscription engine to be easier to understand and to bill more accurately. Here’s what changed:
Ready to go Pro? All info on our Pricing page.
Esc
key can be used for most sub views such as the sort panel, activity, metrics, etc.Now Codecks is even more like playing with cards! We’ve refined the beta of the Hand v2 for more than half a year and it’s now ready for being rolled out to everyone. The completely redesigned Hand tab provides each user with a personal work queue and quick access to conversations and bookmarks.
Cards in your old Hand have been moved to bookmarks.
For more information check out the video below and our manual entry.
In our fourth episode Riad is talking with Philomena Schwab, the co-founder of Stray Fawn Studio (Niche, Nimbatus, The Wandering Village) about the best indie game marketing tricks. Listen to the podcast or read the full transcription on our blog.
Dependencies in Codecks are finally here!
To enable dependencies for your org, open the Mission Control via the Joystick Icon and look for Organization Settings > Features
You can find the manual page for dependencies here.
In future releases we will be focussing on more ways for your audience to engage with your cards. Visitors of your open decks will be able to directly upvote cards from the website. In preparation of that we’re changing our iconography for upvoting: upvotes are now represented by a potion icon. Journeys - who used a potion icon before - are now represented by a new icon.
We’re also reframing how users are interacting with your open decks page. To receive updates they are asked to “join your community”. This will allow them to create a Codecks user account or join with an existing one - and will unlock more functionality in future releases.
q
shortcut for showing owned cards available everywhere where there is a search field.Esc
or the close button.Are you a Codecks Pro user, or thinking about going Pro? Would you like to save some money? Then consider topping up your account balance before November 8th, we’re going to reduce our current outrageous bonuses on that date! More specifically we’re moving from 20%-33%-50% to 10%-20%-30% bonus tiers.
We’re making it easier to fill your project with beautiful card cover images. Here are two new automation options for that:
Any image uploaded will become a cover image. There are two modes:
Both behaviors can be configured and disabled in the organization settings:
To give you more creative freedom, you’re now able to pick a background color for your Open Decks. We’ve also increased the dimensions of the background image.
As you know trading card games are a big inspiration for us. To make sure your cover images are as striking as they can be, we reworked our card display modes. That means that from now on they will not just be more beautiful but also easier to recognize in your decks as we preserve more of the original image color. Let us know what you think!
This is only the first step towards several image-related improvements coming to Codecks soon.
In the bottom right of an opened card, you will now find a number that shows how many cards mention this card. Click on the counter to toggle the card list and jump to any of those cards quickly. This is super useful for maintaining your wiki and GDD inside of Codecks.
ctrl/cmd+a
and b
now work for selecting journey steps.Are you looking for tips and tricks on how to use Codecks? Look no further: we’ve recently launched our YouTube channel where we regularly post short videos to help you get the most out of our tool. As the old proverb says: please like & subscribe!
As you might remember, we also have a podcast dedicated to game production. After a hiatus of several months (we blame the pandemic) we’re now back on track and have recently published two new episodes featuring Marek Ziemak from 11 Bit Studios (This War of Mine, Frostpunk, Children of Morta) and Ata Sergey Nowak from Torpor Games (Suzerain), with more conversations coming soon.
Last but not least, we want to give a shout out to two games that have recently been released, made by teams using Codecks: Kraken Academy!! by Happy Broccoli Games (published by Fellow Traveller) and INDUSTRIA by Blakemill (published by Headup). Congrats!
Maybe you have multiple organization accounts with different projects but you would prefer to have one central organization account instead. Or maybe your student team started as part of your university organization but now you would like to promote your project to run in your own company account instead.
That’s easily possible now: through the organization settings you may now clone projects from one organization to another.
Cloned projects will retain all original information such as card history, activity feed, comments, attachments and once you enable your team members in the new organization, they can continue where they just left off.
Note that notifications, bookmarks and hand information won’t be transferred though.
Oh, and you’re also able to clone projects into the same organization. This might open up some interesting use cases around template projects.
We’re getting closer and closer to release the Hand v2 for everyone. So in case you haven’t tried it out yet, make sure to open your Org Settings and enable it in the “Features” section.
Here’s a list of things we’ve improved:
ctrl/cmd
click interaction which allows to directly add or discard a hand without having to open the Hand Overlay.ctrl/cmd
click interaction allowing to directly add or discard multiple cards at once to the hands of their owners.Unless you’re part of our Discord server, it’s has been hard to discover whether a new release has happened and what it contained. To solve this, we’ve redesigned our release notes. Once you re-open Codecks after a release was made, you’ll get an overview in the app. You also get a chance to leave us your feedback, so we know whether we’re moving into the right direction.
You’ll also start seeing a blue (or yellow) dot next to the joystick icon in the header telling you to reload the page to get the latest version of Codecks.
You are now able to set an “Auto project tag” for your decks. This means all cards within this deck will receive this tag. Removing a card from this deck removes the tag. Look for the 🤖 within your deck’s header to set it up!
In addition we now allow you to decorate project tags with emojis (not just colors)! Every card containing this tag will display this emoji in front of their title.
Combining these features allows for some powerful stuff: You can decorate your #bug
project tag with the 🐞 emoji and use this tag as an “Auto project tag” for your “Bugs” deck. Now every bug card will contain a 🐞 next to their title and can be easily spotted. This feature will also help to keep an overview of your cards when you have lots of different projects. Applying different emojis to decks in you various projects will make it much clearer where a card belongs to.
We think the concepts for the new Hand v2 are fairly unique, so we figured it’s time to make it look unique as well 💄
In addition, we’ve reworked the process for adding a card to the hand from within a deck or milestone. Rather than directly appending a card to a hand, we’re opening an overlay showing the person’s hand, allowing to reorganize it and dragging the opened card into the right place.
We’ve also changed the look of the activity feed in the hand to accommodate for the dark background as well as come up with new way to present inaccessible cards 🕵️♀️.