Changelog

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.

Organize cards with Zones

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:

• Separate the cards inside your milestone by work area or teams (e.g. Feature Team 1, Feature Team 2)
• Separate the cards inside your knowledge deck by type without resorting to tags (e.g. Engine Docs, Business Info)
• Separate cards by additional priority levels (e.g. Do first, Must Have, Regular, Nice to have, Cut Candidate, Postponed)

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.

Quicker access to your Milestone

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.

Streaks

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.

Decky Karma

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:

• Decky can now auto-add members of a specified role to newly created threads. You can find the setting for this in the Workflow state updates section of a command. Use this to auto-add your server moderators to new feedback threads.
• Users reacting to a Decky feedback will automatically be added to the thread. This means that they will also be notified of follow-up information about the feedback that they are interested in.

Further improvements

• Huge performance improvements for screens with a lot of decks or cards. Previously, opening a deck with hundreds of cards could result in up to 3 seconds delay. They now open in a fraction of time through our new smart loading technique.
• Hand section area now auto-collapses to be more readable on narrow window sizes.
• Admins and Producers may change the time tracking entries of other members.
• Fixed an issue that starting a card would sometimes not add it to Your Hand.
• Fixed an issue when setting user access within the project’s user access settings.
• Fixed issue with searching sometimes resulting in internal server error.
• Doc cards get a different color in the Deuter-enhanced color palette.
• Set maximum notification count to 10 per category to accommodate for smaller screens.
• The Codecks Manual received a face lift (and now contains a choose-your-own-adventure, where you try to defeat the mighty card witch).

We’re looking for an Online Marketing Intern

Are you a student based in Germany? Here’s an opportunity to work with us!

Default Inbox Decks

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!

Manual Sorting Milestones

Milestones now support the “Manual” sorting order, which was previously restricted to decks only. We made this the default sort order for milestones.

Options for color-blind card colors

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.

More fixes and improvements

• Quick Tips: When creating a new card, the template card text will now show a random quick tip on how to use Codecks.
• Updated Icons: As we’re streamlining our design language, we’ve updated a few icons: the ones found in the side panel buttons of the card view, some milestone interactions and Due Dates.
• Doc Card Improvements: Hero Cards consisting only of Doc Cards now get a dedicated Doc Hero Card look. Also Doc Cards (and Doc Hero Cards) are now handled correctly in milestones and don’t count towards the milestone’s progress. To find out more about Doc Cards make sure to check out the brand new entry on our Manual.
• Creating a card with a milestone in a deck that isn’t allowed by that milestone’s project restrictions will now result in an error message.
• We’ve renamed all occurrences of Card Status to Workflow state to be consistent.
• Moving a journey step to a different deck removes its dependencies.
• Fixed issue where you could not access cards of cloned projects.
• Fixed issue where downgrading a user to observer in one org limited their access right in their other orgs.
• Fixed crash when opening media library in a new organization.
• Much stricter API validation of data passed to endpoints. If you pass a number where a string was expected, for example, you’ll receive an error message hinting at the wrong field and type.

#MadeWithCodecks

A couple of updates from teams using Codecks:

• Batty Rabbit released Link The Cubes on Steam
• Megagon Industries launched a new free DLC for Lonely Mountains: Downhill titled Redmoor Falls
• Torpor Games announced The Conformist, set in the same universe as their first game Suzerain (which is coming to mobile on December 8th)

Doc Cards

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.

Notification Improvements

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:

• Only the 15 latest notifications are shown in a single category. There’s a box showing the number of hidden notifications. To access these, dismiss the notifications above. This makes it so that you will never have hundreds of notifications pills overwhelming your screen.
• You can now dismiss snoozing conversation notifications(!). These will return again after 3 work days if the underlying conversation is still inactive.
• You’re no longer watching cards by default when creating them. The watch 👁 button has moved from the history panel to the bottom right of the opened card.

Further Improvement and Fixes

• Done Pile: The done pile in your hand dashboard is now automatically cleared at the beginning of the week. Once you click on the done pile you will now see all recently done cards by you, grouped by week. It allows you to go as far back in history as you want and displays the amount of tracked time for that week.
• Milestones: When editing a project-specific milestone, the project picker shows you how many cards are present of each project and warns you if you are about to remove a project (and thus its card) from that milestone.
• Search: You can enter an id (including the $ prefix) to open that card directly.
• Search: Fixed labels for saved searches which included “no decks”, “no projects” or “no milestones”.
• Search: Browser’s back button now works when searching in the “Decks” tab and navigating between cards.
• Bulk Select: Fixed crash in effort picker.

As your team grows, you will need finer user access control options. This release features a big extension of user role management.

New Permission System

• Staff users access can now be limited to specific projects. The old Guest role has been removed as Staff covers the same functionality now.
• Staff users can be promoted to a new 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.
• Access for projects can be set as 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.
• A new 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.

How we’ve migrated the existing roles to the new system

• All members with the new Staff role have the same project access as before. Guests have been automatically converted to the new Staff role.
• The Admin user who has been member of the organization for the longest has been turned into an Owner.
• Projects in which at least one team member did not have access have been set to Limited. All others have Full Team access.
• The Staff role is set to Full Permissions, meaning they can still manage decks, milestones and journeys like before.

Further fixes and improvements

• Multi Card Selection: Changed the selection icon so it looks less related to the done interaction.
• User Reports: Email addresses from User Reports will be shown in the created card, so that you can easily follow-up in case you have questions. (It won’t be accessible for visitors of public projects of course!)
• User Reports: Fixed CORS issue for User Reports in Unity WEBGL-based builds or other browser-based environments.
• GitHub integration & others: Duplicate commits are no longer added to cards (e.g. when a branch was merged).
• Bookmarking: Use . 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.
• Tags: Personal tags using special characters now are highlighted properly within the card. Personal tags can consist of any (unicode) letter, -,_ and .
• Card content: Card references ($123) followed by punctuation are now correctly recognised.
• Milestone overview: Milestones containing public projects have been shown to all users (they were only able to see the cards of the public projects though). Now theses milestones are only shown if team members were given explicit access to at least one project.
• Sub card overview: Moving or removing sub cards no longer removes filtered out sub cards from the Hero card.
• Sub card overview: When clicking on the conversation bubble or the attachment icon in the sub card list, the card will show with the corresponding side panel opened.
• Fixed a crash when opening the history panel of a Journey Step.

User Reporting (Beta)

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.

Improvements

• User Profile now opens in an overlay just like other settings. Profile settings have been re-structured into several sections.
• User Profile allows to log out of all open sessions in the Password section.
• Admins can change the subdomain of their organization via the Organization Settings.
• Dropping a card into an opened sub card adds the dropped card to the same Hero card.
• If opened card is in an hidden project, dependencies, child cards, hero cards and $-card references of this hidden project are still suggested.

Fixes

• The bookmark button now works properly when creating cards within a deck.
• We fixed an issue where clicking on a conversation notification wouldn’t open the conversation panel.
• We fixed a crash when a Hero card’s title referenced a sub card which lead to an infinite chain.
• Respect deck default template (e.g. default owner or priority) when creating cards via sub cards panel.
• Improved performance for creating thumbnails of animated gif or webp files.
• Fixed an issue where removing a locking card resulted in removing all outgoing dependencies for that locking card.
• Guests were able to see all public projects within the organization. Now they’ll only see it if they were given explicit access to it. (They of course can still access them via open.codecks.io)

#MadeWithCodecks

Congratulations to the teams behind these four games that launched on Steam in the past month:

• Catch Me! by ByteRockers’ Games
• CozyTyper by imophi
• In Your Books by Underhill
• Jasper Vice: Legends Untold by Soltorch Games

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!

Increased File and Storage Limits

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.

Search Function

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.

Decky

• The process of reaching the threshold as been relabelled as “promoting”
• You can now manually promote a card via the ⚙️ button in Discord if you have the appropriate user permission

Hacknplan Importer

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.

There’s more…

• Hero Cards: Sub Card items now show conversation preview icon like Mini Cards do
• Project tags: Added “Keep tag when moving card out of deck.” option to Auto Project Tags
• Billing: Allow Organizations on the Plus plan to start a Pro trial
• Lots of bug fixes

#MadeWithCodecks

• The LUAL Games team reached the Kickstarter funding goal for their project [I] doesn’t exist, the campaign is still running so make sure to check it out
• The “one-of-a-kind roguelike deckbuilder / modular synthesizer hybrid” Slopper Johnson: Graviton Agent now has a Steam page, go wishlist it

Pro Trial

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.

HacknPlan Importer

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.

Trello Importer

The Trello importer has been around for a while, but we’ve just made some adjustments to it:

• Import due dates
• Increased total upload limit from 100MB to 500MB
• Fixed attachment uploads

Further improvements and fixes

• Updated look of GitHub/BitBucket/GitLab messages in cards.
• Added warning section to invoice mail if current top-up balance won’t cover the next invoice.
• Locked Hero Cards inherit their locked dependency state to their sub cards.

#MadeWithCodecks

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:

• You can ctrl / cmd + click on a Milestone icon to open the corresponding milestone view! How did we manage to live without this for so long?
• The order of cards within swim lanes when sorting by creation date, update date or upvotes is now consistent.
• The logic for picking a date range within the Time Tracking report date filter has been reworked.
• Entering invalid payment data shows an error message again.
• We’ve also spent some time creating an abstraction for the text editor so that we can experiment with an alternative implementation.

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:

• Entries created via Slash Commands are now upvoted via emoji reactions. We felt that the button we’ve used before was a bit too sterile. Instead we’d like your community to pick their individual favourite reactions and allow to see who reacted to what. The new system counts any reaction as an upvote, different reactions by the same person still count as a single upvote of course. The total number of people who have upvoted are still shown within the upvote button.
• The author of a Discord Slash Command gets automatically added to the conversation thread, in order to be notified if any comment gets posted in it. This also allows to stay in the loop when Decky posts further status updates in the thread.
• Hitting the ⚙️ button on Discord shows a “Help” button explaining what the available options are.
• Channel-agnostic Slash Commands can’t be used within threads anymore.

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.

#MadeWithCodecks

A quick news roundup from teams using Codecks:

• Megagon Industries released Misty Peaks, a new free DLC for Lonely Mountains: Downhill
• Maschinen-Mensch also have a new DLC for their game Curious Expedition 2 out now, titled Shores of Taishi
• Beholder 3 by Paintbucket Games is out as well
• After launching on Steam last year, Kraken Academy!! by Happy Broccoli Games is now available on Switch, Xbox One & GamePass
• Godsbane by Project Hyperdrive moved towards a free-to-play model
• Good Company by Chasing Carrots is leaving Early Access on June 21st
• Out There: Oceans of Time by Mi-Clos Studio is releasing on May 26th

Due Dates

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 all your and your team’s due cards from the Hand via a new tab
• Get notified about all due cards on the day they become due
• Use the new timeline view to see all your due cards next to your organization’s milestones
• Group your cards by due date and search for them
• Use our bulk action bar to set the due date for multiple cards at once
• You have to be on the Pro plan to use due dates

Find out more about Due Dates in the Manual or in this video:

Multi-Dimensional Card Sorting

Our sorting system has received some long-requested improvements to become truly stellar:

• Use ctrl/cmd + click to add additional sorting criteria and have more control of the exact sorting that you want to use
• Cards within swimlanes are now sorted by the primary sorting order (before they were always sorted by priority)
• You can now order by card title as well
• Use the compact mode toggle to skip the grouping and see all the cards right next to each other.

As 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:

Further updates

• Media library: The file overview now supports large files collections with more than 3000 files.
• Decky: Images uploaded via slash commands are now hosted on our servers as Discord tended to be unreliable here. No more “unavailable images”!
• Decky: Discord user mentions are now shown correctly in Codecks card messages.
• Time tracking: allow input such as 1.5h or 2 hours 20 mins when entering custom times.
• Hand Overlay: The Hand overlay will always show a tab for your own hand too.
• Images: support for animated webp images
• Conversation Panel: Comment field now only auto-focus when a new thread is being started by the user

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

www.producthunt.com/posts/decky

• 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

  • Decky adds a /leaderboards slash command: allowing you and your audience to see a private leaderboard for the time frame of your choice.
  • Allow anyone to add private feedback: Hitting the ⚙️ button of a message allows anyone with the configured role to send you private feedback. This will be visible as conversation on your card. Replying on Codecks will send the user a DM via Discord.
  • Allow moderators to deactivate feedback. If a user has the configured role, hitting the ⚙️ button will allow them to deactivate the message. Once they’ve entered a reason, the message will be marked as deactivated: further upvotes are prevented, it won’t show up in leaderboards and the associated card will be archived.
  • We’ve completely revamped the settings section for Decky to be easier to navigate and understand.

Deprecating Discord Commands and Card Creators

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!

Further Improvements

• Discord attachments are used as cover images on cards
• Fixed issue when duplicating multiple sub cards of the same hero card

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.

Decky improvements

• Leaderboards now allow you to only consider recent upvotes
  
• Permission checks when setting up Decky
• Give feedback if a direct message to a user can’t be sent due to their Discord privacy settings

Find out more about Decky in the Manual.

Further improvements

• We now accept SEPA payments
• You can specify that your Open Deck contains adult content, in which case visitors will need to verify they’re 18+
• Added button to download all card attachments as a zip file
• Conversation participant suggestions are now more relevant, based on past conversation partners in the current project
• Added search option “Private cards”
• Bookmarks previously disappeared when the card got archived — we’ve removed this behaviour so you’re not accidentally loosing easy access to these cards

The latest Codecks update is now live — here’s what changed!

Upvote anywhere

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:

• Your community members can now upvote cards not only on Discord, but also on your Open Decks page.
• A new stats dashboard makes it easier to see new upvotes and your most popular cards. It also allows you to quickly see how many fans are visiting your open decks and signing up to receive email updates from your open decks. The upvote statistics can be accessed from the Hand tab by selecting the potion icon on the left.
• Your own team members can now also join in on the fun and upvote cards inside your project (can be enabled/disabled for each project individually). A potential use case is to signal group agreement regarding game design ideas.
• To upvote a card look for the potion icon on top of the opened card.

You can enable upvotes for your team or the community within the project settings:

Find out more about Open Decks on the Manual.

Subscription updates

We’ve reworked our subscription engine to be easier to understand and to bill more accurately. Here’s what changed:

• You pay at the beginning of a billing cycle and not at the end of it. (Existing subscriptions won’t be charged twice of course).
• No more “pay later” option and you’re on a recurring payment cycle by default.
• Adding and removing users to your Pro plan will now be pro-rated. This means that if you add a user halfway through the billing cycle, you’re only going to pay half the price for them. Pro-rated invoice items are being added to the invoice for the next billing cycle.

Ready to go Pro? All info on our Pricing page.

More improvement and fixes

• Rather than working with opacity to highlight the opened mini card, it now receives a green glow. This ensures a much better readability for non-opened card.
• Dependencies and Project Clone feature are now out of Beta. Since the Beta phase has been working smoothly for both features, no further changes have been made, so consider them stable now.
• Esc key can be used for most sub views such as the sort panel, activity, metrics, etc.
• Fix dragging and dropping files for Safari.

Full release of the new Hand

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.

More improvements and fixes

• Swim lanes / Hand: Effort summary now shows completed vs total effort. This area now also contains a summary of the time tracked within a swim lane.
• Metrics: Search filters now affects all relevant metrics.
• Search: Input grows if many filters are present
• Search: Allow searching for “undone” cards.
• Conversations: Fix missing click event for Avatars without image.
• Conversations: More reliable detection of mentioned users when @mentions weren’t directly entered via the editor.
• Dependencies: Archived or done cards being unblocked no longer results in a notification.
• Account creation: resolved a conflict that could happen when user created a new org and was invited to a different org.
• Digest Mails: We’re now syncing your browser’s time zone with your user account. This means we’ll now send daily digests at ~6:15am of your time zone (instead of 6:15am CET). Time stamps in emails are now also converted into your time zone.

New Episode of the Game Production Podcast

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.

Card Dependencies for Pro users in Beta

Dependencies in Codecks are finally here!

• Mark any card as incoming and outgoing dependency
• Automate recurring dependency chains by applying dependencies to journeys
• Filter out locked out cards, so you can focus on cards that are ready to be worked on
• Get notified if a card you owned got unlocked
• This feature is available to Pro users only (This includes users on the education plan as well)

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.

Towards more community driven public projects

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.

Further improvements and fixes

• Open decks: Added search.
• Deck creation: Deck creators are no longer automatically watching these decks. This should lead to a lot less unintended notifications.
• Hand v2: Added a button to open a search result for all your owned cards.
• Search: q shortcut for showing owned cards available everywhere where there is a search field.
• Card View: Cards won’t automatically close anymore when clicking outside the card area. You need to either hit Esc or the close button.
• Automatic cover images: Now works when creating new cards with attachments as well.
• Time Stamps: Statements like “2 minutes ago” or “Just now” will update automatically when leaving a page open.
• Infrastructure: Reworked image handling. Added support for AVIF images for modern browsers, leading to much smaller (and thus faster to load) images.

Top up credit bonus changes coming soon

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.

Automatic cover images

We’re making it easier to fill your project with beautiful card cover images. Here are two new automation options for that:

1. Any image uploaded will become a cover image. There are two modes:

   • Use first image will only apply an attached image if there’s no cover image present already.
   • Use most recent image will overwrite any already existing cover image, which can be a convenient way to visualize the progress of a card.
2. Sub cards will inherit the cover image of their Hero card if they don’t have their own cover image set.

Both behaviors can be configured and disabled in the organization settings:

Customize your Open Decks with a background color

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.

Further improvements and fixes

• Steamy: Our Steam review bot now adds the reviewer name and avatar to the discord message.
• Conversations: Fixed display of portrait images within comments.
• Search: Clearer text hint if your current search results is excluding results in hidden projects.
• Sub card overview: Allow to filter out done & archived cards.
• Sub card overview: Add attachment icon and overlay to sub card element.
• Deck picker: Project names are always visible when scrolling down decks list.

Updated cover image styling for cards

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.

Backlinks

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.

Further improvements and fixes

• Activity Feed: You’re now able to filter your activity feed by e.g. card state changes or conversation updates.
• Font: Updated our font to the latest version(!?), also improved font rendering on Windows.
• Mini Card: Fix tooltip for the color-based project tag dot.
• Bulk Selection: Fix showing feedback for a few actions.
• Conversation Panel: Fix flickering scrollbar when images were present in comments above.
• Journeys: ctrl/cmd+a and b now work for selecting journey steps.
• Done Pile: Admins may clear team members’ done piles.
• Bulk Uploads: Fixed an issue when uploading multiple files to a single card at once.

New: we’re on YouTube!

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!

The Game Production Podcast

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.

#MadeWithCodecks

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!

Clone Projects to other Organizations

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.

Further fixes

• You can declare notification bankruptcy once again.
• Fix broken layout when entering looong words in card creation panel.
• Codecks mails now have a white background in Outlook as well.
• Improve spacing for nested lists and fixed behavior for checkbox entries with complex contents like nested lists or quotes.

Hand v2 improvements

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:

• New layout for the conversation/bookmark/team member hand section. A much more concise view to help you focus on only the important things.
• Reworked the Hand/Bookmark interactions once a card is opened. The bookmark icon has been moved from the top to the bottom right, while the hand button’s behavior is now a) consistent across all contexts and b) featured with an ctrl/cmd click interaction which allows to directly add or discard a hand without having to open the Hand Overlay.
• Likewise the bulk selection bar now has a ctrl/cmd click interaction allowing to directly add or discard multiple cards at once to the hands of their owners.
• New hand icon!

Improved release discoverability

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.

Further improvements and fixes

• Bulk select project tags for copying them to another project.
• Fix image viewer overlay in card history and activity view.
• Don’s show disabled organizations in the Mission Control’s organization picker.
• …and a lot of smaller design and wording fixes.

Automatic Project Tags and Emojis

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.

Further fixes and improvements

• Hero Cards: Hero cards can now have their own effort. The effort shown on the card will be the sum of the hero card’s own effort plus their sub cards total effort. This feature can be useful in case you’re working with Hero Cards as User Stories and want to apply effort only to the User Story rather than the sub tasks.
• Project Settings: reworked the UI of the project tag settings page.
• Android: Disabled spellchecker as it led to annoying glitches in the editor.

Improvements for Hand v2

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 🕵️‍♀️.

Further fixes and improvements

• Steamy: We’re now also showing the reviewer’s playtime when posting a review.
• Text editor: Support for Browser-based spell check. You can disable it from your user profile.
• Time tracking: Hero Cards now show the accumulated time of the card itself and all their sub cards. The history panel and hover info over the ⏱ icon will show the tracked time on sub cards vs the hero card itself. The vertical “micro cards” in the sub card side panel now also contains the ⏱ icon if time was tracked.
• Attachments: The download button should now start a download rather than opening the file in a new tab.
• Open Decks: The updated layout is now applied to all open decks.
• Automatic filtering: When looking at big decks or milestones, an automatic “me” filter is applied to prevent being overwhelmed. The user profile now allows to change the card count threshold or disabling this behavior altogether.
• Mission control: Restyled the project tiles to make them look more draggable.
• Search: You can now filter cards by their Discord upvote count.
• Snoozing cards: Cards only get unsnoozed if a user actively unsnoozes it. Changing any property of a snoozing card no longer automatically unsnoozes it.
• Slack integration: fixed the “Create a card” action for the action dropdown on messages.