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 features, there are a few nice improvements we wanted to release, let’s take a look at them!

Features and improvements

Export GDD (Studio)

The Game Design Model is a perfect tool for documenting the design of your game and keep it linked to your task planning, but sometimes you need a more classic and linear design document. Maybe you need to present it to a publisher, perhaps a partner, or you just need a printed version for a meeting. Now you can export your GDM as a classic GDD in several editable formats, which will allow further processing and prettifying. The available formats are:

• Microsoft Word (docx): This is the most recommended choice, as provides many templating options, better formatting and automatically generates a table of contents.
• OpenDocument (odt): Similar to the previous one, but some features like the table of contents are not available.
• HTML: Single webpage with embedded images.

Limitation: At the moment, the images that are referenced from other servers and not hosted in HacknPlan will be displayed as links instead of images. We recommend adding your GDM images as attachments and then reference them in the description using $.

This is the first version of this tool and we will keep working on it to add more formatting and configuration options. If there are other formats you would like to export to, please let us know.

Image attachments from copy & paste

This is a feature many of you requested as a way of improving the workflow for adding screenshots and other pictures to a task or design element. You can now paste an image from your clipboard into a task or design element, and it will be automatically uploaded as an attachment. Additionally, if the description field is being edited when the image is added, it will be directly referenced in the markdown.

Design Element children activity:

In order to be consistent with the rest of the tabs, the Activity tab of the design element panel can now include activity from all the children of that element, good for giving you a general perspective on the activity of the complete element.

Bug fixes

• Fixed a bug that caused boards to get inconsistent and not load properly when moving tasks from the backlog.
• The task editor tab selected at the moment was not being shown in the URL when the task was in the backlog.
• The task counts on the category icons were not being updated when moving several tasks to another milestone at once (using the premium multi-selection feature).
• Drag & drop for attachments was not working properly on some versions of Chrome.
• Adding a user to one or more projects directly when inviting them to an organization wasn’t available since the previous update.
• When the real-time connection is refreshed (like after a long period of inactivity) the list of online users is not updated.

What’s next?

We will keep working on the big features that we hope to release at the end of the summer, but we will also find time to keep fixing bugs and add other smaller improvements in the meantime.

Happy planning!