HacknPlan Erfahrungen

Made for Game Development

Kommentare: It's been great. We've tried a lot of different approaches to task tracking (which was possible due to the flexibility of the tool) and always found a good fit for each project/team.

Vorteile:

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.

Nachteile:

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

[FREE VERSION] An awesome tool for Game Design

Kommentare: [FREE VERSION]
Absolutely advised especially for a first-time implementation of Agile mindset in a project, more advanced managers may find the paid version more complete but I found all I needed, and all my team learned to use this tool very quickly, even those with no interest or past experience with team management.

Vorteile:

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.

Nachteile:

Honestly, nothing worth mentioning so far.

So nearly great

Kommentare: We found this software slow, and clunky to use. Although it's absolutely bespoke to games development and has naming conventions we can all understand and get behind, sadly it's not well enough developed to be a truly reliable and useful system.

Vorteile:

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.

Nachteile:

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.

Very slick project management tool

Kommentare: Very pleased with this software so far! Highly recommend for smaller teams. Great pice point.

Vorteile:

Simplicity is it's strength. The GUI interface is very friendly. It might be overwhelming first time but it's nothing compared to overpriced jira for example. It has all functionality you need to run the project and schedule it properly.

Nachteile:

Still need some improvement with for instance Discord integration which is very crucial in game development community. Wish it has app version as well.

Powerfull but frightening tool

Kommentare: It was simply too much, half the way when i was setting up everything i just surrendered and think to myself "i ratter go to clickup or Jira"

Vorteile:

Hack n' Plan is really a complete tool, it has every function you wish you had in your hand.

Nachteile:

It has for me a great fault, it is a huge overkill for an indie dev like myself and it is very expensive also, and if i was a Big Triple A dev i would simply use Jira. It is too big for a indie and too small for a big company, it stay in the valley between two possible target users and doesnt get suit and focus on one.

Gamificated kanban board

Vorteile:

It has great colors, it seems to be cut right for games. It also has design document section which comes in handy.

Nachteile:

It's hard to track categories of tasks/issues created on boards.

A very useful workflow tool

Vorteile:

The learning curve seemed relatively smooth. It's designed with a fairly natural flow, particularly if you've used organizational and workflow software before. Buttons pushed do what you expect, and navigating through certain hierarchies move you to screens you expect.

Nachteile:

It almost seems sometimes there is too much functionality, ie different ways you can navigate to the same thing. Althought I imagine in the game development world these are probably all necessary.

Great tool, sometimes overwhelming

Kommentare: Hacknplan is a fantastic tool for organizing indie game dev projects. It is very powerful and still simple to use. It's multitude of features can become overwhelming at times and some features still need some love.
Overall a clear recommendation for small to medium game dev endeavors.

Vorteile:

It is powerful, yet simple to use. With hacknplan I plan, manage and track all my game dev projects and even private things. It has a beautiful front end and the integration of tasks with a structured game design document makes it ideal for game development. The project planning and metrics tools make it easy to keep track of progress.

Nachteile:

Working with a larger team can become rather expensive. The calendar, Gantt charts and burn down charts feel a bit awkward at times. With many features that overlap in their purpose, it can become tricky to find the right workflow. Tasks, Stories, subtasks, milestones, design nodes. There are many systems to structure tasks and it is easy to be overwhelmed by this and lose the core purpose: structure.

Game production planning finally easy

Vorteile:

Hacknplans customer service is top notch and fast!

Nachteile:

Software is still work in progress and needs new features

Great tool for organizing my game project with both tasks and outlining.

Kommentare: Higher productivity and organization. Highly recommended if you are using Trello and need more.

Vorteile:

The tool for task management with categories, stages, and milestones. I was using Trello before but I was having issues organizing everything on a giant board. With HacknPlan I split the tasks up between the milestones but the the Game Design Model keeps the bigger picture available. Overall, this tool has made me more productive and organized in my game projects.

Nachteile:

I'm really hoping for more updates. Everything works for the most part but some features such as dragging and dropping don't work very well in Firefox. And it needs more integrations. It just barely added support for Bitbucket but it has had Github support for much longer. They have a lot in the roadmap so it's not like the they don't know we want more, just it's still a young tool and still growing.

Tienes que darle una oportunidad a HacknPlan

Vorteile:

La facilidad de su uso y las facilidades en la gestión de las tareas que ofrece, son suficientes para los pequeños proyectos que trabajo hacen de HacknPlan el mejor recurso para pequeñas y medianas empresas

Nachteile:

No he podido utilizar todas las características porque estoy usando la versión gratuita

Orientado a proyectos de videojuegos

Vorteile:

Me ha gustado la implementación de la documentación con la organización del proyecto

Nachteile:

Realmente no encuentro ninguna desventaja

Excelente herramienta para gestionar proyectos de videojuegos, aunque demanda cierta familiarización

Vorteile:

Lo mejor es la capacidad de conectar diferentes tareas a través de un Design Element, lo que se puede analogar con una Épica. Adicionalmente, la posibilidad de gestionar varios proyectos en paralelo y la flexibilidad para incorporar usuarios a los distintos proyectos son los puntos más fuertes.

Nachteile:

La navegación y la interfaz gráfica podrían ser más intuitivas, ya que a veces cuesta distinguir entre User Stories y Tasks.

Hacknplan para desarrollo de videojuegos

Vorteile:

Es intuitivo y ayuda en mi flujo de trabajo.

Nachteile:

El timer no está disponible en la versión gratuita.

A game developer oriented task manager

Kommentare: Task management that is Game developer oriented and easy to use, so developers can focus on developing the game.

Vorteile:

This software is focused on game development task management, that means it allows you to track tasks, resources committed to each task, milestones, performance, create custom items type related to specific game dev features/mechanics. It also lets you create specific categories to anchor tasks, but it comes with a base layout that is good enough to start.

Nachteile:

Its easy to use but its basic, can work well for small companies/projects and the customization of Design objects is limited to a fixed list of item types.

I love the software and it fits our projects perfectly

Vorteile:

What I love the most is the way I can customize the data in the task list making it fit our projects and work style perfectly.

Nachteile:

What I like the least about the software is the notification system. We have turned it off because if floods email/slack with notification that don't really tell anything. For example if another user adds a comment, then the comment given should be included in the email/slack notification, but I only get a notification that there is a new comment available on a given task. When you get between 10 and 50 of these a day, it get a bit annoying.

Initially it meets the requirements for our project, but it's missing key features.

Vorteile:

Nice overview and kaban usage. Easy way to organize tasks. A bit expensive, but the customer support is spot on.

Nachteile:

No notifications of overdue tasks! No logical breakdown of hours invested for individuals for shared tasks. There should also be discord integration as HnP is for game dev, and discord is as well.

An improvement to our workflow

Kommentare: Improvement in the workflow and communication in the team.

Vorteile:

Its game development focus and kanban implementation has making it very intuitive to use for all members of the team.

Nachteile:

That it doesn't have a public API. This is relevant for us as we work in Unity3D and we would love to have tasks completed from the editor itself.

Helped us a lot to link what we're doing (through GDD) and what we must do to make it happen

Vorteile:

GDD linkage to tasks, export of GDD, easy and fast task creation, good overview of where we stand in terms of each milestone.

Nachteile:

Nothing in particular comes to my mind, since drag and drop has been improved it works OK on small screened mobile devices now (this was my only gripe before).

Very promising but the development is always slow and delayed

Vorteile:

The unique one for game development Game design model

Nachteile:

High price comparing with current features Slow development

Perfect for small private game projects

Vorteile:

Fast, can access from anywhere, easy to use, streamlined for game development, also includes game design model

Nachteile:

Pretty basic features locked behind studio license, which I won't get for my single developer purposes

Quite amazing

Kommentare: Better team management, better and clearer GDD, the GDM is amazing

Vorteile:

It is easy to use , the interface is very intuitive and the GDM makes it a great product for game development compared with the competition

Nachteile:

When the sidebar is present the loading circle is not aligned with the center of the custom background image, that bothers me quite a lot.

Keeps me organized and focused on sprints. Agile meets game development, and it's awesome.

Vorteile:

I love the agile workflow, particularly milestones and time estimation. The integrated time tracker is really nice too.

Nachteile:

It could be a little faster/I'd love a native desktop version. The GDM could use improvements, mostly because it houses high-level aspects of the game which don't really utilize due dates or things of that nature.

When use to using those kind of tools, it was easy to get into

Vorteile:

Flexible boards, gantt, milesones, autosave, several assigned to one task, sub-tasks. It is also great that you can integrate several third-party services.

Nachteile:

Like it or not, I'm not a big fan on how the game design model is. We don't have our design documentation in hacknplan, but use google docs for convenience and because people that are not part of the dev. also needs to read and review them. Hacknplan seem to be very based around the game design model, but it is a feature that we don't really use. A normal wiki (with the ability to limit some pages to only a few w. access) would be more useful.

Project management for game development

Kommentare: Managing the game creation process can be very complex but with this tool it is much easier and more likely that you will complete your games.

Vorteile:

It has a modern and intuitive look and structure. Even a beginner can use it. Free version has basic tools to manage your first projects. In addition to the free plan, it has some growing plans adding more advanced features.

Nachteile:

it only has an English version, which can be a difficulty for some people. There is no integration with version-control tools in the free version.