HacknPlan

I really like the Design Model. We have all our game design in the Design Model and all the tasks connected to it. This system makes it much easier to communicate information to all team members working on a feature simultaneously. The Kanban board is also very clean-looking and can be customized to fit each project's pipeline.

I've had a few bugs with the software, but they were fixed within a day after contacting support.

Almost everything is user-friendly and quick to learn, the interface is clear and the features are perfect even in the Free version. As a GD student, I found extremely useful the fact that the tool is already fully configured to develop a videogame using the Scrum methodology, with Tasks, User Stories, Velocity calculation and so on. Just Awesome, saved us a whole bunch of time.

Honestly, nothing worth mentioning so far.

For many years, games developers have had to suffer the wrath of the "project manager", the traditional ways of software development rules and law. Waterfall this, and MS project that.

Because games development is such a creative environment, traditional methods of tracking progress simply don't work. Tasks can repeat, tasks can simply disappear because they are no longer relevant, when you start you simply don't know where the end point will be. Nine times out of ten, you're not sure what you're actually doing.

This all sounds like chaos? Right? So what you need is a really simple way of tracking the things your team are doing, broken down by discipline, with a centralised way of keeping everyone on the same page with the current ideas and concepts of your magnum opus.

Along comes hacknplan, created and used by games developers, that should be perfect right? They've made games before so know "how it is" and will be able to make a software system that is bespoke to games development.

They almost get there too, there's a central design repository that is great for keeping your projects latest and greatest documentation in, and then tasks can be easily managed per discipline. Overall it's nearly right, but see my cons section for where it all falls a bit short.

My biggest problems with Hack N Plan is that the trial / base version of the software is far too lightweight to be useful, and then the gap to the paid tiers, simply is too big. It's expensive for what it does, and we found the website to be slow and unresponsive (at best) without any mobile app integrations.

But also, we found it has a problem with "mouse click verbosity" (for want of a better term) - it literally does *nothing* for you automatically on the lower tiers. Want to set a start and end date for a task? that'll be 7 mouse clicks to you kind sir, want to copy a task and rename it? Okay, we'll append the world "CLONE OF original task" to the name of the task and you'll have to manually edit this out every single time.

There's so much right with this software, but you can easily tell it's not made by a team of 100 software developers in Southern California. It's made by a small team who aren't implementing features or fixes anywhere near fast enough for professional games development teams to have full confidence in it's platform.

It's project reporting tools are also, not good enough for the amount of effort that is required to on-board the entire studio onto the platform. The output is simply not equal to the amount of effort it requires to do even the basics.