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 a gamedev project I finally abandoned at the beginning of the current year, called Invertium. This project was cancelled and restarted several times during three years (if you are an indie developer maybe know what I’m talking about), and I used several planning tools: Trac, The Bug Genie, Jira and Trello. All of them have things I like, but none of them was exactly what I needed, so I tried alternatives from time to time.

I was a solo developer at that time, so my requirements were not very high (I would like to dedicate a post at some point about why you SHOULD do project planning even though you’re a solo dev). But last year I started working together with an artist, and I remember how much he hated one of the most common planning tools in the industry when he was working at a large mobile developer. Then I realized that, being game development so multidisciplinary, if some tools are over-complicated and not very user friendly even for programmers, I can’t imagine for other technical profiles like designers, artists, musicians… So I thought: there should be a better way of doing this for game development, specially for solo developers and small teams. So I put some bits of software oriented tools like Jira, the simplicity and cleanness of Trello, and the special context I can provide knowing that this is for game development… and that is HacknPlan.

I am just taking the first steps of this journey, there is a lot of work ahead. Right now HacknPlan is very simple, but if you take a look at the roadmap and have some imagination, you can see the potential of this idea. My intention was to give the core of this tool to the indie gamedev community as soon as possible, because they (you) are the ones who can make a success out of this. I need you to give me your feedback, ideas, suggestions and use your experience to make this project become the preferred choice of indie developers. If HacknPlan is a success, it would mean that indie developers are getting something that improves their workflow, their efficiency, and that gives them something no one does. And, why not, maybe we find out that there are more aspects of game development that could be better with dedicated tools.

Thanks for reading, and if you try HacknPlan beta, please give me your feedback to make it better and better.

Happy planning!