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 tab names. This number refers to how many open tasks are inside a tab, and allows you to quickly know where do you have pending work. It may happen that you put some task inside a category you don’t use much and you forget is there, so we added this little reminder to avoid this kind of issues. I hope you find it useful.
• We also added a quick menu to task cards in the kanban boards. This menu allows you to perform frequent operations on the tasks without having to enter inside the details page. You can easily send the task to another milestone, assign or unassign users or delete it. This can improve dramatically the efficiency when doing repetitive operations (like setting up an existing project or adding a lot of new requirements at once).
• We turned the planned and total cost into decimal values. This has been requested by the users several times. Some people want to reflect more accurate costs, so now you can create tasks with a cost of 0.25 hours, for instance.
• We started to implement the inline help, that displays a brief description of the panel/page/feature and some useful tips. Not everything has been implemented yet (the game model and details pages have no help yet), but we will complete it very soon.

Master data

We are working on providing full customization of the categorization fields of the system, like categories, sub-categories, platforms, game model elements… In the meantime, we added a few more values based on your feedback.

Subcategories:

• Programming:
  • Gameplay
  • Test
• Ideas:
  • Research
  • Prototype

Game Model Elements:

• Menu
• Cutscene
• System
• Mechanic
• Character
• Object

As you can see, we are giving a new dimension to the Game Model feature, allowing you to categorize not only by “narrative” points of view, but also by parts of your system that are somehow technical but don’t correspond to a single category, but to a few of them working together. Now, for instance, you can create an element of type “Character” and put all the tasks related to that character into it, including the art, the programming of his/her input or AI, the voiceovers… The possibilities are a lot.

Bug fixes

We also fixed some bugs:

• The color legend in the Category Distribution panel was not shown in milestone page.
• Adding an apostrophe to the title of a task in the detail page truncated it.
• If a user was invited to a project, registered but not activated the account, assigning a task to him made the board crash.

What’s next?

For the next iteration we are going to spend several days reviewing the application from the performance point of view. We know there is room for improvement, so we want to bring you the best experience we can.

Happy planning!