https://hacknplan.com/blog Product updates, team insights, and best practices for game development teams. en-us Sun, 29 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://hacknplan.com/blog/a-fresh-look-for-hacknplan https://hacknplan.com/blog/a-fresh-look-for-hacknplan HacknPlan enters a new era with refreshed branding, a modern faster website, improved documentation, a cleaner v1 interface, and performance and usability improvements across both v1 and v2 modules. Sun, 29 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/the-future-of-ai-in-game-development https://hacknplan.com/blog/the-future-of-ai-in-game-development Artificial intelligence is no longer a distant concept in the gaming industry. It is already becoming part of the everyday workflow of many studios, and its influence continues... Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/introducing-the-documents-module https://hacknplan.com/blog/introducing-the-documents-module We are excited to announce that the new Documents module is now available in HacknPlan!! Every successful game project needs a single source of truth. When documentation is scattered across different tools, drives, and chat threads, teams lose alignment. Decisions become harder to track. New members struggle to onboard. Context fades over time. Starting today... Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/how-to-master-sprint-planning-for-game-developers https://hacknplan.com/blog/how-to-master-sprint-planning-for-game-developers Effective sprint planning forces clarity before work begins. It surfaces conflicts early when they are cheap to resolve. It gives everyone a shared understanding of what \"done\" looks like for the next two weeks. That shared understanding is worth more than any tool or methodology. Tue, 24 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/prioritizing-features-in-game-development https://hacknplan.com/blog/prioritizing-features-in-game-development In modern game development, prioritizing features is both an art and a science. Teams must balance player value, technical feasibility, business goals, and team capacity while navigating fast-changing technologies and player expectations. Successful prioritization reduces wasted effort, shortens feedback loops, and helps teams avoid last-minute scope creep and unsustainable crunch. The best teams combine clear […] Tue, 17 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT HacknPlan Team https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-november-25 https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-november-25 Hi hacknplanners, Today, we present a new update for HacknPlan v2! I must start saying this is a \"boring\" update, meaning it doesn't touch very relevant modules of the application, such as the kanban boards, design model, or metrics. However, you will be able to experience a glimpse of the new HacknPlan v2 UX, the […] Mon, 10 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/announcing-hacknplan-v2 https://hacknplan.com/blog/announcing-hacknplan-v2 Today, we are announcing the roadmap for HacknPlan v2!! HacknPlan v2 is a major evolution of our platform, a comprehensive overhaul designed to make your game development planning more powerful, flexible, and enjoyable. This new version is not just about adding new features and a slightly prettier UI; we are rebuilding from scratch the entire […] Thu, 25 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-june-25 https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-june-25 Dear Hacknplanners, Today marks the beginning of a new and exciting chapter in the HacknPlan journey, one we've been shaping for quite some time. Believe it or not, HacknPlan has been around for almost 10 years already, and while the platform has grown a lot since the early days, some parts are starting to show […] Sun, 22 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-feb-25 https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-feb-25 After the most recent update, HacknPlan is the only project management tool that natively supports the visualization of 3D models. Sun, 09 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-oct-24 https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-oct-24 Hi hacknplanners, This update comes with handy features that will help you customize the work item and design element editors to fit your workflow. After last year's big UI update, we have received so much feedback about how you miss some of the simplicity of the old work item and design element editors, so we […] Sun, 13 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/hacknplan-pricing-changes-2024 https://hacknplan.com/blog/hacknplan-pricing-changes-2024 We’re introducing some changes to our pricing plans that will become effective on November 5th. We have stuck to the same prices since the first premium tiers of HacknPlan were released back in 2017, and our goal always was to provide an affordable solution for game developers to manage their projects, from hobbyists to indies […] Tue, 27 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/hacknplan-discord https://hacknplan.com/blog/hacknplan-discord You asked for it and, finally, here it is! We are releasing the beta version of our Discord integration, which comes packed with features. Let's dive in! Team commands This first version of the integration is all about slash commands. After integrating your project with your Discord server, you'll be able to execute common day-to-day actions... Sun, 19 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/the-bug-triage-process https://hacknplan.com/blog/the-bug-triage-process Bugs. That pain in the ass. Every development team is afraid of bugs. They can slow down your development process, derail your planning, ruin your release and make your game have a bunch of negative reviews because it shipped half-broken. That’s every studio’s nightmare. However, bugs are unavoidable. Games are such complex pieces of software […] Fri, 05 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT Lidia Machuca https://hacknplan.com/blog/smoothing-out-production https://hacknplan.com/blog/smoothing-out-production This article is a collaboration with Ewan McKenzie, Producer at Ant Workshop, about the importance of time logs for game production. At Ant Workshop, we’re a small indie studio that has worked on a variety of projects of differing scopes. From small prototypes to porting PC titles to consoles, to the full development of our […] Tue, 05 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT Lidia Machuca https://hacknplan.com/blog/the-planning-fallacy https://hacknplan.com/blog/the-planning-fallacy What’s the planning fallacy? The planning fallacy is a common bias in which people tend to underestimate the time required to complete a project. This happens because they are too optimistic about how things will turn out, making two main mistakes: overestimating positive outcomes and underestimating time, costs, or risks of future actions. The planning […] Thu, 11 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT Lidia Machuca https://hacknplan.com/blog/improving-team-communication https://hacknplan.com/blog/improving-team-communication This article about team communication is a collaboration with Rubén Calles, he began his journey in game development in 2014, and since then, he has collaborated with various studios. He published \"A Place for the Unwilling\" with his first company, Alpixel Games. Later, he directed the art for \"The Fabulous Fear Machine\" at Fictiorama Studios. […] Wed, 13 Dec 2023 00:00:00 GMT Lidia Machuca https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-45 https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-45 Hi hacknplanners, We are back with an important and long-awaited update, we have been receiving a lot of feedback from you and prepared a new release that focuses on UI/UX. Our main goal was to make the user interface cleaner, sharper, and more intuitive, and reduce clicks to perform common operations. We also included some […] Fri, 11 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/how-to-plan-an-indie-game-on-time-and-budget https://hacknplan.com/blog/how-to-plan-an-indie-game-on-time-and-budget Planning is one of the most crucial aspects of game development, as it is necessary to organize both time and resources as efficiently as possible. For this purpose, the production process plays a relevant role. In this article, we will share valuable insights into how we manage our projects. Mon, 07 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT Lidia Machuca https://hacknplan.com/blog/5-strategies-for-smart-team-collaboration https://hacknplan.com/blog/5-strategies-for-smart-team-collaboration When managing projects, it is often necessary to collaborate with external teams, and it is not always easy to assess which ones will generate a smooth and productive workflow. In this article, we have teamed up with our friends at Brave Zebra to provide five key best practices that are considered essential for successful collaboration. Tue, 11 Jul 2023 00:00:00 GMT Lidia Machuca https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-44 https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-44 Hi hacknplanners, Here we are again with a small but very useful update, let's take a look at the new features! Resizable panels Many of you have complained about the size of the task and design element panels. Depending on your device screen size and ratio, the fixed value we had before could make the […] Mon, 31 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/mastering-the-game-design-model https://hacknplan.com/blog/mastering-the-game-design-model Since the creation of HacknPlan, our main goal was to provide game developers with a tool that could make planning projects easier and more intuitive. With this objective in mind, we came up with an idea to build a system that could be used to create a GDD (game design document) in a more dynamic […] Thu, 11 Aug 2022 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-43 https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-43 Hi hacknplanners, Here we are again with a small but important update that includes features some of you have been requesting for a long time. Let's get started! Guests (Studio tier) You've been asking for this and here it is: you can now add Guest users to your workspace that will have read access to […] Mon, 19 Apr 2021 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-42 https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-42 Hi hacknplanners, I hope you are all healthy and safe and enjoyed the holidays. We are back with a small but necessary update focused on stability and performance, and we also took the chance to fix plenty of bugs. Performance Regarding performance, we have focused on the Game Design Model this time, which was causing […] Sun, 10 Jan 2021 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-41 https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-41 Hi hacknplanners, It's been a while! I hope you can forgive us for the long time of silence, this year is not being easy for anyone and we are no exception. I sincerely wish you and your loved ones are safe and healthy, and that your businesses are not extremely affected by the whole COVID situation. […] Sun, 27 Sep 2020 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/hacknplan-api-public-beta-is-out https://hacknplan.com/blog/hacknplan-api-public-beta-is-out Hi hacknplanners, It has been a while since we announced our intentions of releasing an API for our service, but it is finally here, we hope it is worth the wait. This first one is a public beta version of the API which, even though it contains most of the functionality of our service, […] Mon, 16 Dec 2019 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-40 https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-40 Hi hacknplanners, I hope you all are having a wonderful summer! We have just released a new update that includes some anticipated improvements and features. Ready? Go! Story tasks on the kanban board When we released the user story feature recently, we wanted to give you a way to define complete features as kanban […] Sun, 04 Aug 2019 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/scrum-and-videogames-3 https://hacknplan.com/blog/scrum-and-videogames-3 This article is a collaboration with Mauricio García, CEO and Producer at The Game Kitchen (The Last Door, Blasphemous). You can find his original article in Spanish here. Our daily routine At The Game Kitchen, every team member starts their day in HacknPlan, reviewing which are their pending tasks. After that, we have a \"daily meeting\" […] Wed, 03 Jul 2019 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/scrum-and-videogames-2 https://hacknplan.com/blog/scrum-and-videogames-2 This article is a collaboration with Mauricio García, CEO and Producer at The Game Kitchen (The Last Door, Blasphemous). You can find his original article in Spanish here. Read the first part: Scrum and videogames 1: Introduction Preparation of the meeting Our team is partially in the office and partially remote. The music composer works on his […] Wed, 26 Jun 2019 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-39 https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-39 Hi hacknplanners, A new update has been released with a series of small but very useful improvements and bug fixes. Let's take a look! Improvements Bug fixes What's next? Happy planning! Sun, 23 Jun 2019 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/scrum-and-videogames-1 https://hacknplan.com/blog/scrum-and-videogames-1 This article is a collaboration with Mauricio García, CEO and Producer at The Game Kitchen (The Last Door, Blasphemous). You can find his original article in Spanish here. At The Game Kitchen, we started to apply Scrum 7 years ago, and we have been making it our own since then: we only keep those practices that […] Wed, 19 Jun 2019 00:00:00 GMT HacknPlan Team https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-user-stories https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-user-stories Hi hacknplanners, Are you a Scrum practitioner and lover? Then you will be happy. Damn, you'll probably be happy even if you don't use Scrum; this feature is very useful for so many reasons... User Stories are here!! Many of you have been requesting this directly or indirectly. We've had plenty of feedback requesting the possibility […] Sun, 31 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-christmas-edition https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-christmas-edition Dear hacknplanners, Merry Christmas everyone! I hope you are enjoying this time of the year around family and friends. This is the best moment to do a retrospective about your year, what went well, what went wrong, what needs to improve and what will be done to accomplish it. We hope this year was a good one for […] Thu, 27 Dec 2018 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/black-friday-2018 https://hacknplan.com/blog/black-friday-2018 Hi hacknplanners! Black Friday is here and comes with a great promotion: 30% off on new yearly subscriptions and upgrades!! Whether you want to subscribe for the first time, upgrade from Personal Plus to Studio, from Monthly to Yearly, or even increase the seats of an existing Studio subscription, this is the best moment! Get your […] Fri, 23 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/polishing-edges https://hacknplan.com/blog/polishing-edges Hi hacknplanners, I hope you are enjoying the new HacknPlan and you are already accustomed to the new user interface and features. We are aware there are many things to polish and improve and plenty of important features waiting on our backlog, so before continuing adding the rest of the big features listed on […] Mon, 22 Oct 2018 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/major-update-released https://hacknplan.com/blog/major-update-released Hi hacknplanners, After so much hard work, sweat and tears, the major update of HacknPlan is finally out! We are so happy to see it live and also expectant to see how you guys receive it. We are aware that this update introduces so many structural changes and you may feel a bit lost or […] Sun, 23 Sep 2018 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/hacknplan-update-announced https://hacknplan.com/blog/hacknplan-update-announced Hi hacknplanners! The major update we have been announcing since the beginning of the year will finally be released next week, on September 24th. We know you've been waiting for it for so long, so we want to apologize for the delays and the lack of information about the progress lately. The truth is […] Mon, 17 Sep 2018 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/release-progress-update https://hacknplan.com/blog/release-progress-update Hi hacknplanners, It's been a while! As you know, we have been pretty busy working on the major release we announced back in February. The list of features and improvements we are working on was made taking into account all the suggestions and ideas we've been hearing from you, both directly and indirectly, and I […] Mon, 11 Jun 2018 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/spring-sale-18 https://hacknplan.com/blog/spring-sale-18 Hi hacknplanners! Spring is coming and we want to celebrate it with a great Spring Sale: 30% off on new yearly subscriptions and upgrades!! Whether you want to subscribe for the first time, upgrade from Personal Plus to Studio, from Monthly to Yearly, or even increase the seats of an existing Studio subscription, this is […] Mon, 19 Mar 2018 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/hacknplan-update-2018 https://hacknplan.com/blog/hacknplan-update-2018 Hi hacknplanners! As the title says, we are heading to a major update to be released in the second quarter of the year. If you’ve been following our progress so far, you probably know we iterate and release frequent updates including new features, improvements and bug fixes, like one or two per month, depending on […] Thu, 15 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-34 https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-34 Hi hacknplanners! This new update comes with a surprise in the form of a brand new integration: Bitbucket is here! One of our most important goals is centralizing your game production data, so you have a place where you can go to check all the aspects of your game in a semantic and clear […] Sun, 03 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-33 https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-33 Hi hacknplanners! A new release is here! The focus of this update has been on bug fixing and adding some improvements to the UX department we hope will make you more productive. After the last update, the one rebuilding the drag and drop system, you may have noticed some instability and certain performance issues (especially […] Sun, 05 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-32 https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-32 Hi hacknplanners! This update is a special one. Instead of delivering new features, we focused on rebuilding one of the most important parts of HacknPlan: the drag and drop system. Many of you have complained during this last two years about the performance and usability of the current drag and drop system, which is […] Sun, 08 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/birthday-promo https://hacknplan.com/blog/birthday-promo Hi hacknplanners! It's been 2 years since the first version of HacknPlan was released, and we want to celebrate it with a great promotion: 30% off on new yearly subscriptions and upgrades!! Whether you want to subscribe for the first time, upgrade from Personal Plus to Studio, from Monthly to Yearly, or even increase the seats […] Mon, 25 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-31 https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-31 Hi hacknplanners! I hope you all had a great summer and had the chance of resting and recovering energy for the remaining months of the year. We certainly did, but still had the chance of working on some little features and improvements we just released. If you have been following our last few entries of […] Sun, 17 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-30 https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-30 Hi hacknplanners! It's been a while since the last update! Summer, you know... But the truth is we are focused on some important and big features that will take longer than a regular iteration to be released, like the API, the new drag & drop system and others. Although we did little besides working on those […] Sat, 22 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-29 https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-29 Hi hacknplanners! We welcome the summer with a little but interesting update. The main improvement coming today is the new syntax for writing and reading time-based costs, something you have been asking for some time which definitely improves the time management and avoid possible mistakes. We also added a comment section to the GDM, fixed several […] Sat, 24 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/summer-sale https://hacknplan.com/blog/summer-sale Hi hacknplanners! The Summer is here and we want to celebrate it with our first Summer Sale: 50% off on new yearly subscriptions and upgrades!! Whether you want to subscribe for the first time, upgrade from Personal Plus to Studio, from Monthly to Yearly, or even increase the seats of an existing Studio subscription, […] Sat, 24 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-28 https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-28 Hi hacknplanners! HacknPlan 1.0.2 is here! This new update comes with many improvements in terms of usability, as well as a brand new integration for Personal Plus and Studio users: GitLab! Additionally, we fixed many bugs and improved the performance of some sections, among other things. Let's dive into the fun stuff! Features and […] Sun, 04 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-27 https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-27 Hi hacknplanners! Finally, the first update after the release of version 1.0 is here. This is a small one, though. We haven't implemented many new features, we were more focused on solving bugs, improving the stability and performance of the system after the official release, and planning a roadmap for some important epics coming in […] Sun, 14 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/hacknplan-1-released https://hacknplan.com/blog/hacknplan-1-released Hi hacknplanners! Finally, after more than 1 year and a half in beta, HacknPlan is hitting version 1.0! I'm not a fan of the big releases with fireworks, we believe in iterative development and this service is and will always be in development, our work is never over. So, what does it mean then? Well, […] Mon, 03 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/1-0-coming https://hacknplan.com/blog/1-0-coming HacknPlan 1.0, the first major version of our project management tool for game development, will be finally released on April 3rd, Monday, a week later than we initially announced. The reason behind this short delay is we want to finish some important features that are still in progress and also perform a complete regression test […] Mon, 20 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/studio-showcase-3 https://hacknplan.com/blog/studio-showcase-3 Hi hacknplanners, In this Studio Showcase chapter, we interview Grover Wimberly IV, Producer / Director / Game Designer at Whim Independent Studios, an indie game development studio based in San Bernardino, California. After delivering their first game for Android, ANTics, Whim Independent Studios started using HacknPlan to organize Selatria, a classic RPG for PC currently under […] Tue, 28 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-26 https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-26 Hi hacknplanners! Another update of HacknPlan is finally here, the last one before the release of version 1.0 at the end of March. I wanted to clarify, since many people asked about it, that our premium tiers will have a trial mode after beta phase is over, allowing you to test the advanced features on […] Sun, 19 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-25 https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-25 Hi hacknplanners! Here we go again with a new update full of features and improvements. This time we are adding some very requested features for both free and premium users, so I'm sure there is something for you here. We are finally releasing the first batch operations over tasks on the kanban board and […] Sun, 05 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/studio-showcase-2 https://hacknplan.com/blog/studio-showcase-2 Hi hacknplanners, This week we interview Bounder Games, an indie studio from Dundee, Scotland. Bounder Games was founded in 2014 by Sarah Herzog, Roy Stevens and Levie Drysdale, and they are currently working on their original and colorful third mobile game, Armoured Engines. Sarah talks about their experiences using HacknPlan. The goal at the […] Thu, 26 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-24 https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-24 Hi hacknplanners! This is the first update of the year and, as we promised in previous dev diaries, it comes full of new features and improvements. During the past months, we worked on some systems and backend stuff we couldn't release yet but was the foundation for many other features, so you can expect […] Sun, 22 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/personal-plus-available https://hacknplan.com/blog/personal-plus-available Hi hacknplanners, As we announced at the end of last year, we are introducing a new premium tier and making it available for pre-order and early access as we did with HacknPlan Studio. This new tier is called HacknPlan Personal Plus and its goal is to provide some of the features included in Studio but […] Sun, 22 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/studio-showcase-1 https://hacknplan.com/blog/studio-showcase-1 Hi hacknplanners, Welcome to the first entry of Studio Showcase, a new series of interviews where we will be discovering some of the studios using HacknPlan and how they use the tool to manage their projects. Our goal is to show you real examples of project management workflows and methodologies, including tricks and tips from […] Tue, 17 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/share-experiences https://hacknplan.com/blog/share-experiences Hi hacknplanners! We know you are building amazing games with the help of our platform, and we are really proud seeing how your projects progress and are successfully released. I'm quite sure many of you are interested in learning how other studios and devs are using HacknPlan to organize their projects, their tricks, their challenges and why they […] Fri, 30 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-23 https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-23 Hi hacknplanners! Welcome to the last update of the year! This iteration has been focused on milestones, changing how they work internally to allow calculating better metrics and build more features based on them. We have done a lot of work under the hood that you can't see yet but will be very relevant for features coming […] Wed, 21 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-22 https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-22 Hi hacknplanners! This new update is all about data entering and leaving the system. We finally added GitHub integration for HacknPlan Studio users, which allows you to connect your project to your GitHub repository and link commits to tasks in a very useful way. On the other hand, we added two features for everyone that […] Sun, 04 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-21 https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-21 Hi hacknplanners! This iteration has been focused on putting in place the activity log, a feature many of you have been requesting since almost the beginning. We started to build this system long ago, but we were not sure about the first approach we took and decided to rewrite it from scratch. The change was […] Sun, 20 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-20-shapes-colors https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-20-shapes-colors Hi hacknplanners! This milestone has been affected by some unexpected incidents that made us not fully complete all the tasks we planned. I'm talking about the decision that Braintree (payment gateway provider) took about not giving us service after being fully integrated with them and already receiving payments. I won't go into details now, but […] Mon, 07 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-19-sharpening-edges https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-19-sharpening-edges NOTE: In order to make understanding our new premium plan more intuitive, we have renamed it from HacknPlan Professional to HacknPlan Studio. We hope this makes more evident that only one account per studio is needed, which will pay for seats for the rest of the members. Hi hacknplanners! It's been a while since the last […] Mon, 17 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/professional-plan-announced https://hacknplan.com/blog/professional-plan-announced PRE-ORDER NOW! Hi hacknplanners, One year ago today, the first version of HacknPlan was launched. I remember this post on Reddit asking the gamedev community for feedback and trying to get our first early adopters. I was so nervous wondering if they would like the concept and would give it a try. Many of them […] Mon, 26 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-18-markdown https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-18-markdown Hi hacknplanners, This update comes with one of those features we have been willing to implement for quite a long time. I'm talking about the markdown editor, replacing the existing rich text editor we have been using since HacknPlan was launched, almost a year ago. And, why replacing the existing editor? Why markdown? Well, there […] Sun, 18 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/thanks-to-10k-of-you https://hacknplan.com/blog/thanks-to-10k-of-you Hi hackplanners, Today is a special day. Today we reached 10000 registered users in HacknPlan, and I'm writing this short post just to say THANK YOU. Now that our first birthday is really close (we launched the first version of HacknPlan beta on September 26, 2015), we can take a look back and see what […] Tue, 06 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-17-smoothing-learning-curve https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-17-smoothing-learning-curve Hi hacknplanners, This is certainly one of the most special updates of HacknPlan so far. Today I won't talk about any new features, nor visual improvements, nor relevant bug fixes. Today, we release an update that is focused on learning. Up to this moment, no documentation nor guide has been delivered, except maybe those small tooltips […] Sun, 04 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-16-legend-shortcuts https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-16-legend-shortcuts Hi hacknplanners, We haven't added any major feature during this release; instead, we have focused on several small improvements you requested many times, so I hope you are happy with the changes. Finally, we have added some keyboard shortcuts that will enhance your productivity. We still have many others to implement, but this first batch already […] Sun, 07 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-15-game-model-love https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-15-game-model-love Hi hacknplanners, This new update comes with several improvements on the game model tool, one of the key organizational features of HacknPlan. We have introduced several usability and navigation changes in order to simplify the usage, like a fullscreen view of the tree when no element is selected, different tabs for tasks and properties to maximize […] Sat, 16 Jul 2016 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-14 https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-14 Hi hacknplanners! We come with very little new features this time. Instead, we have added some very valuable improvements in terms of performance and usability, that I hope you find interesting. This iteration has been a little different from the normal ones not just because of the focus on improvements, but also because we haven't […] Mon, 20 Jun 2016 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-13-2016-06-06 https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-13-2016-06-06 Hi hacknplanners! A new update of your sexy game project management tool is here! This time, we added two interesting new features: a search engine that will ease your life when you need to locate a task, and also task dependencies, a way of preventing changing the status of a task until the tasks it depends […] Mon, 06 Jun 2016 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-12-2016-05-23 https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-12-2016-05-23 Hi hacknplanners! This new update comes with a pair of interesting features many of you were waiting for: the backlog panel and the email notifications. We had another cool feature we couldn't finally deliver this iteration, task dependencies (blocking tasks until others are completed) but we underestimated some of the backend work that was required to […] Mon, 23 May 2016 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/understanding-vertical-slicing https://hacknplan.com/blog/understanding-vertical-slicing ...or how to create feature based iterations of your game. When it comes to project management in general and prioritization in particular, many doubts arise among developers, especially in small teams and/or indies who don't have the clear figure of a producer. This does not apply to game development only, it happens to other kinds of projects too, […] Sat, 14 May 2016 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-11-2016-05-08 https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-11-2016-05-08 Hi hacknplanners! As we announced in the last post, this new update comes with very important changes in the way the application is organized and how you navigate through the different sections and tools. For those who are very used to the old navigation scheme these changes might be a little confusing at first, but we […] Sun, 08 May 2016 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-10-2016-04-26 https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-10-2016-04-26 Hi hacknplanners! This update comes with few but very important new features. First of all, we have rebuilt our authentication and authorization system to make use of the OAuth2 protocol, which allows you to use external providers to get access to the application among other things. And... surprise! We have implemented the first one: Google. This […] Tue, 26 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-9 https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-9 Hi hacknplanners! It's been a month since the last update of HacknPlan, instead of the usual 2-3 weeks cycle. The reason? Two wonderful weeks of vacations I enjoyed in the sunny Almeria, south of Spain (place where I come from, by the way). I'm sure you will forgive me :-). As a compensation, I come with a […] Sun, 27 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-8-2016-02-28 https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-8-2016-02-28 Hi hacknplanners! A new update is live! I have to say I couldn't deliver all the features I initially planned for this iteration due to personal impediments, however I managed to bring you some little improvements that are very useful and can make a difference. Let's check them out! Features and improvements Importance level for tasks: We […] Sun, 28 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-7-2016-02-13 https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-7-2016-02-13 Hi hacknplanners! We have a pretty interesting update here. Finally, we implemented one of the most requested features: file attachments! Many of you have requested this feature tons of times, in order to upload your screenshots instead of having to link them from external storage services. Now your files can be contained in HacknPlan and, most importantly, under the privacy […] Sun, 14 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-6-2016-01-20 https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-6-2016-01-20 Hi hacknplanners! This is the first devlog of the year. We already deployed some of these features a few weeks ago, mainly small improvements implemented during Christmas time, that I will also mention here. We start the year full of energy to work on the challenging and exciting roadmap we have in front of us and […] Wed, 20 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-5-2015-12-21 https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-5-2015-12-21 Hi hacknplanners! I've been quite busy recently, mainly working on the notification system which is the main feature we are launching this week. It's been quite a lot of work in the shadows to prepare the system for many new functionalities related to activity in HacknPlan. We are not only sending notifications to keep you updated about what's […] Mon, 21 Dec 2015 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-4-2015-11-25 https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-4-2015-11-25 Hi hacknplanners! I'm back with some interesting updates. We've done a lot of backend work regarding the notification system that is not ready yet, but will come soon. In exchange, we implemented several usability features and visual improvements I'm sure you will like. Let's go! Features and improvements One of the most important changes is the […] Wed, 25 Nov 2015 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-3-2015-11-15 https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-3-2015-11-15 Hi hacknplanners! It's been longer than expected since my last update. I try to do really short iterations and deploy new stuff into production every week or so, but I have to admit that I underestimated the main feature I had to develop this time and it ended up taking a lot more than expected. Anyway, all […] Sun, 15 Nov 2015 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/project-planning-for-solo-game-developers https://hacknplan.com/blog/project-planning-for-solo-game-developers I was a solo game developer myself when I came up with the idea of HacknPlan, it was something I really needed in order to organize my work the way I wanted. Maybe I'm a control freak, but I really believe a proper work methodology and planning is key to make a serious project a success, no matter […] Wed, 28 Oct 2015 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-2-2015-10-26 https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-2-2015-10-26 Hi hacknplanners! We don't have big visual changes this week, but we improved a bit the performance of the application and added several improvements and bug fixes. Let's take a look! Features and improvements We improved the performance of the kanban boards. There is still big room for improvement, but we reduced the loading time of […] Mon, 26 Oct 2015 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-1-2015-10-14 https://hacknplan.com/blog/dev-diary-1-2015-10-14 Hi hacknplanners! I'm adopting this concept of weekly development diary to explain the changes I'm applying to the application and what I will be working on during the next iteration. Today we pushed live several interesting improvements and features. Here we go! Features and improvements We added some small badges with a number inside after the category […] Wed, 14 Oct 2015 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/a-week-of-hacknplan-beta https://hacknplan.com/blog/a-week-of-hacknplan-beta It's been a week since I released the first version of HacknPlan beta and I asked the gamedev community for feedback. You people are amazing!! I received a lot of information, bug reports, suggestions, opinions... The comments are pretty good generally speaking, and even though this is just a beta and there is a long […] Mon, 05 Oct 2015 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez https://hacknplan.com/blog/welcome-to-hacknplan https://hacknplan.com/blog/welcome-to-hacknplan Sooo HacknPlan beta is live. Wow, it has been a crazy journey since I decided to start working seriously on this project, like 6 months ago, using just the free time I can steal from a full time job and my father responsibilities. I had this idea long time ago while I was working on […] Fri, 25 Sep 2015 00:00:00 GMT Chris Estevez