About 5 months ago I spent a weekend creating a project management tool (named BrainWave) for my game development. I received positive feedback and a few developers were interested in trying it out so I launched a private beta. During the last 5 months I’ve had a steady trickle of invite requests. I’ve also continued to develop BrainWave.
I’ve been using BrainWave as my primary project management tool for my games and this is primarily what has driven its development (along with suggestions from users through the built-in feedback). Overall I’m happy with the direction it’s headed. I’m trying to keep the functionality simple and focussed, avoiding a mass of unused features. In essence, it still consists of an area for capturing ideas and a list of tasks (either added directly or converted from ideas).
I’ve just released version 0.4 which is actually a fairly big deal for the project. It introduces a new look (a refinement of what already existed but making better use of the screen real estate), nails down the existing features, and fixes a myriad of bugs. For those of you not in the private beta, here are the headline changes from that initial post 5 months ago.
- A new look – Not as dark, massive amounts of idea space, and a streamlined task interface
- The positions of your ideas are automatically saved between sessions
- Filter on completed/open tasks
- The ability to create lists (Converted ideas appear in the currently selected list)
- The ability to add tasks directly to a list
With version 0.4 being such a drastic change, I’ve produced a new screencast to demo the features (which you can checkout below).
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ub9PTHkMkCY]
The next logical step then is version 0.5. This will be a feature release so will have some new things to play with (in addition to the usual bug fixes and further improvements to the code). I haven’t finalised what it will consist of yet but here’s a rough idea of what I want to add to BrainWave in the future.
- The ability to track multiple projects from one account (this is crucial)
- Milestones (e.g. release date, etc)
- Some way to track project progress and current phase (perhaps tied to the milestones – I’m thinking a filmstrip type of thing)
- Ordering of tasks
- Edit Ideas after creating them
- Multiple users on one account
- The ability to move tasks back into the idea space
- The ability to move tasks between lists easily
- Optimisations for use on the iPad/iDevice
- Export options
BrainWave will go public at version 1.0 – A fair way off yet but by that time I expect to have used it to manage a fair few games.
If you’re interested in BrainWave you can sign up to the private beta here. I’m also interested to hear if its a tool you think you would use in production (and perhaps even pay for). I’d like to point out that I don’t currently have any plans to monetise it.