HacknPlan, the Trello for game development

Hi folks,

I just wanted to share a tool I'm working on, that may be useful to some of you. Its name is HacknPlan and it's a web project planning tool specially designed for game developers. As I say in the title, it has been described by the current users as a "Trello for gamedev", as it is simple and clean, but it provides several organizational features to fit better the game development workflow using basic agile concepts. In the future, the application will incorporate more and more features and integrations that are gamedev centered.

We released an open beta in September that is completely free to use, and we are more than 1200 registered beta users at this moment. We are currently working on improving it with the feedback from the community, so if you try it any comments or suggestions would be very much appreciated.

hacknplan.com

Happy planning!

 

Awesome I love Trello, but the biggest problem it lacks is good reporting and time allocation of tasks etc.
If you can get these in, it will be awesome.

 

PHP makes me sad. But looks like a really good product! I'm with @Meltdown, it would be nice to have more project management / asset (as in people) management type features. Since you have kanban support on the roadmap, you might think about other agile (scrum) methodologies as well. Maybe you could integrate with a tool like Pointing Poker. It doesn't have an API, but I bet the guy who built it could add one. And if he says no, tell me and I can turn around and smack him since he sits about 5 feet from me.
http://www.pointingpoker.com

 

The application is not built in PHP, the product landing page and blog is wordpress which is PHP, but the application is a .NET api in the backend and an AngularJS SPA in the frontend. About methodologies, it doesn't enforce any particular methodology, but it has a clear agile orientation. It uses the kanban panel as tool (like scrum and many others) but not kanban as a methodology. It supports time and points, so it would be usable with Scrum.

 

Cool. I just signed up to check it out. If you ever have any angular questions you can always ping me. I've been doing it extensively for the past year and have built a couple of pretty slick services and directives.

 

Looks good but no self hosted option. This is an open source Trello alternative ,

https://wekan.io/

 

Thanks

 

That may come in the future, depending on the demand. The application is a 1.5 months old beta, so we are just starting out with this and iterating. Anyway, we are not trying to be just a Trello clone, but something specially designed with game development in mind.

 

This looks really promising, good luck with it.

 

I really like it, but how about privacy? There is completely no information on who can see your project, who can edit it etc.

 

Everything is completely private. You can invite other users to join your project and setup some permissions too. There is no social aspect in the application. But you are right, I need to better explain this. In the future I will allow the user to make projects public (or parts of it), as many people is asking for it.

 

One thing I noticed really weird was when creating project / task names... there is a dropdown that already appears to have some values in it... like a typeahead. So I see "0" and "$4000" and some other weird stuff. Is it showing me names that other people used?

 

That is really weird, nobody reported anything like that, could you please send me a screenshot? Which is the field name where you're getting those values?

 

I'll have to play around with it. Interestingly, today I'm not getting anything so it looks fine. Yesterday when I signed up and didn't have any projects, it was any of the boxes that supported typeahead, showing random values. Now they're not showing anything.

 

OK, I'll try to reproduce it. Thanks for the feedback

 

I've just registered on HackPlan, it's looking pretty good so far, here are some small suggestions...

- When you're already on the board for a specific milestone, when adding a task, there's no point on the form asking the user to specify the project and the milestone again.

- When adding a Task, Instead of the user having to type in the cost, do it like the 'Scrum for Trello' plugin, where the user just clicks on a Points value button icon. So if the metric is points, do 1,2,3,5,8,13,21. And for hours, you would well do the same. It sure beats having to type it in.

- Same for the SubCategory, make clickable button icons instead of a dropdown list, much more efficient.

- You could once again do the same for platform, button icons will also make the form look a lot more sexy

- Scrolling is bad! I really don't want to have to scroll to enter information into a task. Make sure all of the form content fits on the screen without having to scroll. Using icons as mentioned above should give you a lot more room to work with.

- You're missing Windows Store Apps, Windows Phone and WebGL from platforms. 'Others' is not a very nice option.

- You should be able to attach files to tasks, and preview them like in Trello

That's all for now, I'll use a bit more and provide more feedback.

 

Thanks for the feedback! I agree with most of what you say, I have to iterate over those things to improve the user experience.

When adding a task and you are already in a project or milestone the value in the dropdown is pre-filled, so I think is not that bad. It allows you to create a task directly there for another project or milestone without having to navigate to it, which I think is a good thing.

About the cost, I'm not sure that would work for everyone. Many people asked (and I implemented) the possibility of adding decimal values for hours, so I don't think fixed values would work there. Some people want to be very specific. And about the points, your suggestion works for scrum, but I wanted it to be a bit agnostic regarding the methodology. However, I plan to provide an add-on in the future to "Scrumify" the tool.

Platforms: yes, there are more, what I'm planning to do very soon is to add custom values, just in case you need something that is not there. However I'll try to add more.

File attachment: planned! hacknplan.com/roadmap

 

chrisestevez well done! What about a workflow functionality, like the one offered by https://pyrus.com/en/ I'm using it currently and would be glad to review your project on this as well.

 

Looks very good and it adds just the things I'm missing in Trello (progress bar and statistics; a burndown chart would be brilliant!)

The unknown future price point and lack of self-hosting support are not ideal for me, though

 

Thanks!

The future price is not unknown. The core version (what you have already plus some other features about to come) will be always free. We will have paid add-ons in the future that we don't know the price yet, that is true, but what we can tell is we will have small add-ons instead of big plans with lots of features, so you will be able to purchase only what you need. This is briefly explained in our faq. We are just starting out with this project and we can't say more for now, but we will as soon as we have more details.

About the self-hosting, that's something we may end up doing, but it is not in my immediate plans. The reason is we are just starting out and that will require a lot of extra work that we cannot face right now. Is hard to compete with the big guys

 

Thanks for the suggestion! Yes, we plan to add something like that in the future as an add-on. We are trying to cover the core functionality first, the one which is useful for everyone regardless the team size, and we will work later on add-ons to make the tool suitable for bigger teams (advanced reporting, more complex permissions, workflows...).

 

A few gifs of our new Category Editor, which will allow you to customize the technical categories and sub-categories predefined in the system. This way you can optimize the tool to fit your project and remove tabs and elements you don't really need, which makes everything clearer and easier to manage. This feature will be online next week.

Creating a new category and sub-category:



Disabling and sorting categories:

 

Using it and love it so far. Very useful.

 

Is there a possibility for a wiki feature down the line?

 

Liking it so far. One fix I would ask for is organizing milestones by due date instead of alphanumeric

 

Yes, we plan to integrate a wiki in the future.

 

The current sorting mechanism is by update date, so the recently updated milestones will appear first. However, many people have asked for many different sorting methods, so our solution will be to allow you to sort them by hand using drag and drop. We will implement this during the next weeks.

 

I noticed right after I sent my message. That would be helpful, thanks.

 

We launched our new category editor feature today. This is something many people asked for, if you already used the tool and thought it was too rigid, then you will like these changes: http://hacknplan.com/dev-diary-3-2015-11-15/

 

We are working on new features that will be online this week, like the new sub-tasks as a checklist in the task details:

 

Hi guys,

I'm back with some news about the development of HacknPlan. We have launched our notification system, you can read more about the details here: http://hacknplan.com/dev-diary-5-2015-12-21/

Cheers

 

Hi fellow devs,

I have written a post in our blog summarizing the first months of life of HacknPlan and also giving an overview of our business model and the features that will come this new year. If you are not using HacknPlan yet but are following the progress of the tool, I'm sure you'll find this post very interesting and will clarify many things.

As a recap, two important announcements:

1. We have removed the limit of 10 users per project, so HacknPlan is now free for any number of users and projects. As we explain in the post, we will monetize the service via subscription based add-ons with extended functionality that will have a fixed price no matter how many users your project has.
2. We expect the full official release of HacknPlan (we are currently in beta phase) for the second quarter of 2016. That release will include all the core features announced for the core free version plus the first add-ons.

Read the full blog post at http://hacknplan.com/a-look-back-a-look-ahead/

 

Hi guys!

A new version of HacknPlan was released yesterday, including a new global board containing all the tasks of a milestone, a redesign of the board layout and many improvements for the mobile version of the site.

http://hacknplan.com/dev-diary-6-2016-01-20/

Cheers!

 

This is fabulous! We will be moving our project. Thanks!

 

Looks awesome. We just formed a small studio yesterday & I reckon my partner will jump at this when he sees it.

 

Looks really good. Will keep an eye on this? Any Slack integration like with trello?

 

Not yet, as the application is still in beta, but we plan to do so. Take a look at the roadmap here.

 

Hi guys,

We have updated the application today, including file attachments, board pictures and task cloning. You can check all the changes here.

 

This looks really cool. I've been using Trello for about a year now but it's never quite fit 100% for game development. Unfortunately wasn't able to sign up (reported via the contact form), but can't wait to try it out.

 

You can register now, there was an issue after the update but it's now fixed.

 

Hi guys!

We have a new update of HacknPlan. Check out the details here.

 

Really looking better and better, keep it up! Will definitely give it a try for my next project.

 

@chrisestevez haha from that image you've uploaded, it looks like your product went from Trello to Freedcamp

 

Haha, is a different part of the application xD

 

Just moved from trello to HacknPlan, and wanted to thank for this awesome tool! Can't wait for task filter feature.
If you're going to create paid version with more features I would definitely take advantage of it.

 

Do you guys tie in to git?

 

I can't seem to get in. I have an account, but it keeps saying my password is wrong. I changed my password, and it still does not work. Tried a second time, password does not work. I am absolutely sure I am typing it in correctly.

Tried to register again and it won't take my registration because I already have an account.

 

Hi Teila,

That is really weird. Did you activate your account following the instructions sent by email? Please contact us here and we can help you with your problem: http://hacknplan.com/contact/

 

Yes, I activated and even put some stuff in it, but had some issues so haven't been back in a while. I will send an email. Thanks.