Welcome to Codecks! In this document we’ll provide a overview for everything that you need to know to get started with Codecks.

We developed Codecks after creating games for over 10 years. In that we time we tried a lot of solutions out there: Jira, Trello, Hansoft to name a few. We were not satisfied with any the options out there and built Codecks to be just the right tool. Here’s what makes Codecks different from other solutions:

Playful We have been in too many projects where ugly and slow tools were pushed onto the team, resulting in nobody wanting to engage with the tool. That causes all kinds of problems down the line: communication becomes fuzzy, scope unmanagable, deadlines are missed. We wanted a tool that feels a playful and meticiously crafted as the UI in our games, because only if the whole team embraces a tool - from game designer, to programmer and artists - the tool can provide you with the eagle eye perspective that you need. Playfulness for us is a necessasity to make sure that you get the most out of the tool.

Laser focused on game dev Most project management tools try to be everything for everybody at once, ending up as a overcomplicated mess. From day 1 we focused on the needs of game devs. That allows us to make better choices in terms of what to include or not. It helps that we’re using it every day ourselves to make video games professionally. It allows us to streamline to the features that are needed, nothing more, nothing less. All the power, without the extra weight of apeasing to every use case imaginable.

Unique Integrations Our focus allows us to bring unique integrations that you won’t find anywhere else. We think community management is the new super power of modern organiziations and we’re integrating features like discord community management, open roadmaps and in-game reporting seemlessly with your project management experience. We also have built-in Unity and Unreal integrations and lots more.

Cards

States

Codecks uses a trading card game metaphor. Every task, document or bug is a card in Codecks. Cards come with built-in properties that help you manage them. The most important ones are effort and priority. Each card also comes with it’s own built-in workflow. A card can be in any of these states:

Unassigned (a card that is still looking for a owner)
Assigned (a card that has a owner)
Started (a card that is currently being worked on)
Blocked (a card that has needs to have an issue resolved, before being able to resume work)
Review (a card that is done and you want to inform other people on your team)
Done (the card is done)

Conversations

The blocked and review state are special because they are modeled as conversation. We believe strongly that communication is the biggest challenge for big teams. When you set a card to blocked or review you can pull other team members into a conversation thread for your specific card. The team members receive real-time notifications letting them know that their input is required. Of course you can may also start conversations outside of the block/review card states at any time.

What makes these conversations in Codecks special is that:

Conversations have a start and end point, instead of being a endless stream. Conversations should always have a specific question that you want to solve. Once that goal is reached the conversation is closed and Codecks can rest calmly until the next conversation needs to be addressed.
Codecks will remind you of ongoing converations that are not resolved. We call stale conversations ‘snoozing’.
Conversations always have a specific people involved. You can dynamically add team members at any point if you need additional input.
Team members can remove themselves from a conversation to signal that they have no more input on the subject.

This makes conversations especially powerful in Codecks. You can think of it as a built-in no-question-unanswered guarantee. No more important conversations that are forgotten in a random DM convo.

Usually a card goes through these states: Start card ➡️ Block card (if you run into issues that require other team members) ➡️ Review card ➡️ Set to done

One thing that makes Codecks different is that it does not use the usual Kanban representation, but allows you to slice and dice information as needed. You can resort and filter any deck or milestone as it makes sense for you.

To help you automatically clean up your projects, Codecks will archive cards after they have been done for a while. You can customize the duration when this happens in the org settings. Archiving just means that these cards won’t be shown and clutter up your view by default. They are always just a click away if you want to look at all the work that has been accomplished in a milestone for example though.

Decks

As with any project you will be dealing with a lot of cards over time. Let’s briefly check how to manage these in Codecks:

Let’s say you created a couple of these cards. What do you do once you have multiple cards? You stack them into a deck. You do the same in Codecks. Each card can belong to exactly one deck. You will find the collection of decks inside your decks tab. You can think of your decks tab like a backlog: a collection of all tasks, ideas and bugs that you might want to consider for next week, next month, next year or.. even never. This is the place where you collect everything from ideas that are way too big to concrete cards that you want to tackle next. These decks can grow to thousands of cards.

A good way of setting up your decks is by creating a deck per work department (e.g. coding, game design, art) or by asset type (e.g. enemies, weapons, levels) or a mix of both. You can use spaces within projects to differentiate between these different deck types and to aid orientation. You can also add descriptions for any deck, to make it easier for your team to find the right deck in which to put a specific card. Additionally you may even set a default inbox deck per user, so that your cards are automatically created in the coding or art deck for example.

Decks with Spaces

Milestones

Overlooking thousands of cards is tricky, so you might want to condense the amount of cards into work-sizeed chunks by assigning them to milestones. Milestones are collections of cards that are associated with a specific date. You can assign any card from your decks to a milestone. Lots of people like to create periodically recurrent milestones (e.g. a milestone once every two weeks). These are often called ‘sprints’ in other tools. Milestones might also represent a specific release date or publisher contractual milestone that you need to hit. You can mix these types of milestones of course.

Timeline

Once you start using milestones, you will have filtered the backlog down to a smaller selection of cards that you are comitting to. That’s a great base for getting work done. When you check what to do next, you won’t have to scan all the decks, but can just focus on the select cards in the milestone to decide what to do next.

Hand

Depending on how far the milestone date is away, it might still contains dozens of cards. You can split up your workload further by using your hand. That’s a unique concept in Codecks and it represents the cards that you want to tackle next. In Codecks - like in real-life - everybody has their own hand. The hand tab is also the central dashboard in Codecks. It allows you to check out your hand (the cards that you are working on next), ongoing conversations (including reviews and blocked cards that require your input), your bookmarks, due cards, hands of other team members and even a dedicated personal quick view of your ongoing milestone.

Quick Hand View

As you work on projects, the order of this might change. That is completely fine. For example while working on a milestone, you might realize that you learn about a new aspect of the feature that you’re working on and you choose to add a card to milestone directly (you still will need to assign a deck too though). Or you’re working on a smaller project where you just want to put cards directly from the decks tab into your hand and work through these. You may choose to even disable the milestones feature completely to not be distracted by the UI. Codecks is flexible enough to allow to adapt around your project and team size.

Community

Creating a cool project, you want to make sure that it is being seen by as many people as possible. That’s where the second big component of Codecks comes in: community management. Codecks offers some fairly unique ways to engage with your community from within Codecks.

Our unique discord integration allows you to collect bug reports right from your discord community
Our open decks allows you to publish a dedicated roadmap that you can update from within Codecks
Our user reporting allows you to collect bugs and feedback directly from your game using Unity, Unreal or our API

This is an example for where we can focus on integrations that other companies won’t care about.

Example Leaderboard as shown in Discord

Setting up your first project

Here’s a suggestion on how to organize your first game project.

Under your project have a space called ‘tasks’ that contains decks representing work areas (e.g. coding, animation, modeling, texturing etc).
Have another space called ‘GDD’ (that stands for Game Design Documents) that has decks representing assets of your game (e.g. enemies, levels, weapons).

Using this approach allows you unlock two of the strongest tools in Codecks: Hero Cards and Journeys. Hero cards are cards that contain other sub cards. These sub cards are as powerful as any other card. They can have a owner, effort, priority, milestone, tags. Journeys are predefined templates for creating these sub cards automatically. You can think of these as asset pipelines. Using both of these features has many advantages:

For any asset you can have a quick overview which related open tasks are related. Which textures still need to be created? Which coding tasks are associated? How many bugs are known for this asset?
It saves a lot of busy work time creating the same cards over and over again
You can codify best practices and make sure that you don’t forget about creating certain tasks

This is just a first overview of what Codecks offers. If you want to speed up your workflow make sure to check how to use the quick settings and use shortcuts. If you want to divide cards further, make sure to check out tags and dependencies. Not every card in Codecks has to be a task, it can also represent complex text documents that are documents and linked together like a wiki.

Enjoy your Codecks journey!

Fundamentals

Card Basics

Organizing Cards

Advanced

Integrations