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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
But looks like a really good product! I’m with 
