HacknPlan is a collaborative project management tool tailored for game developers and producers. With HacknPlan, teams can create tasks and assign them to members, set up milestones and deadlines, create game design documentation, track the progress and generate metrics and statistics to evaluate the performance of the team. This way, game developers can avoid or minimize most of the problems that cause projects to fail: unrealistic scope, bad planning and team alignment, unforeseen risks and bottlenecks.
We wanted to learn more about HacknPlan's new platform, and the problems it can help game developers solve so we sat down witih their founder, Chris Estevez to dig a little deeper.
ADM: Why do game developers need project management?
Estevez: Games are really complex pieces of software that normally involve many people and different disciplines. There is a lot to do, many dependencies among different tasks and, often, reduced resources and time. The key to making all of this work is keeping the roadmap as clearer as possible and keep everyone on the same page. A
project management tool like HacknPlan allows the team to have a single source of truth, a place where anyone can go and check the status of the project, who is working on what, what is coming next and an estimation of goals to accomplish.
ADM: Does the approach work for tiny indie developer teams too?
Estevez: Of course, a big percent of current HacknPlan users are small
indie developers that need something not as complex as traditional project management tools but not as simple as personal organization tools or to-do lists. HacknPlan is right in the middle and is designed in a way that is intuitive to learn for game devs. Besides that, HacknPlan offers an unlimited free plan which is ideal for indies and small teams that are starting out and can't spend much money until their work starts to give benefits.
Chris Estevez, founder of HacknPlan
ADM: If you were to pick one feature of the solution that stands out as the “must have benefit”, what would it be?
Estevez: If there is one feature in HacknPlan that is pretty unique and can't be found in other solutions, is the Game Design Model. HacknPlan integrates a game design documentation editor, so game designers and producers can build the famous GDD (an industry standard document) in a much more dynamic and intuitive way. Instead of a linear, isolated and hard to maintain document or wiki, HacknPlan allows building design documentation as a tree structure of elements with content (text, pictures...) and link those elements to the tasks that will convert that design into reality. This way, tasks get much more context and meaning from the design documentation, and the design elements get progress and metrics. All in one single application, easier to maintain and available even for free accounts.
ADM: When if the official launch?
Estevez: After one year and a half in beta, HacknPlan 1.0 will be officially launched on April 3rd.