Project Management Software for Gaming

The board that describes the build after the fact is already wrong

Game studios run three kinds of work at once, on different clocks: core engineering against a launch window, content production that has to be ready before code freeze, and live-ops work that doesn't stop just because a launch is happening. Most project tools handle one of the three reasonably and force the other two into an awkward fit.

The specific failure with the engineering side is a board that lags the actual codebase. Someone has to remember to drag a card when a PR merges, and on a team shipping dozens of PRs a day around a launch, that upkeep is the first thing to get skipped. The board ends up describing what the build looked like a few days ago, which is worse than no board at all if a producer is making launch-readiness calls off it.

ShipSprint closes that specific gap: branches move cards, and a merged pull request closes them, without anyone updating the board by hand. The board stays synced to what actually shipped, which matters most in exactly the compressed final weeks before a launch window, when the gap between "board says done" and "code says done" gets expensive to discover late.

A production cycle, walked through

In pre-production, the forecast isn't especially useful yet. There's not enough completed sprint history to project from, and the team is still finding its actual pace rather than following a plan. That's normal; it's not a gap in the tool, it's just too early for a measured-velocity forecast to say much.

By alpha, a few months of real sprints exist, and the forecast starts flagging something specific: a systems-engineering workstream is completing story points slower than the plan assumed, which shows up on the board weeks before code freeze, early enough for a producer to cut scope deliberately, rather than the team quietly cutting corners under pressure at the end and everyone finding out in QA.

In the final weeks before launch, GitHub branches are moving cards dozens of times a day as engineers push toward code freeze, and the board stays accurate without anyone babysitting it, because merges close cards automatically rather than someone updating status between fixing bugs. After launch, live-ops content keeps running on its own calendar-based board, uninterrupted by the fact that the "launch project" itself just wrapped up.

Engineering, content and live ops, one board logic each

Engineering gets sprints, story points, releases and cycle-time analytics with the GitHub sync doing the busywork. Content and live-ops teams get calendar-based views suited to recurring event cadences rather than being forced into a sprint structure that doesn't fit how a content drop actually works. Same subscription, same reporting, different vocabulary for each.

The owner command center then rolls all three into one view. A producer can see engineering's sprint burndown, content's readiness against code freeze, and live-ops' event calendar without switching tools or waiting for three separate updates. That matters most in the weeks a code-freeze date, an asset-lock date and a day-one live-ops calendar all have to converge on the same launch week, and someone has to make a go/no-go call with all three in view at once.

Shipped work, not hours at a keyboard

No screenshots, no keystroke logging, no activity tracking. A studio culture that already fights a reputation for crunch doesn't need software that measures how long someone sat at a desk. What's recorded is delivered work: merged code, shipped content, logged hours.

Scorecards are visible to the person they describe and adjusted for leave, so a developer who took approved time off during a launch push isn't penalised for it in a review that happens weeks later.

The forecast exists to make crunch a deliberate, informed decision rather than an unplanned scramble. A producer choosing to push a compressed final sprint because the data shows it's genuinely necessary is a different situation from a team discovering three weeks late that they were behind the whole time. That's arguably the real value for a studio: the same forecast that catches a slipping systems-engineering workstream at alpha is what tells a producer, honestly, whether the last sprint before launch needs to be a hard push or just a normal one.

What it costs

A studio's headcount often swings hard between pre-production and a full production ramp, and per-seat pricing means the bill tracks the team's actual size rather than a fixed enterprise contract signed at a different headcount.

• Free covers 5 users and 2 projects, forever, enough for a small team prototyping before a full production ramp-up. Team is ₹299/user/month or ₹2,899/user/year for up to 40 users and includes the GitHub sync; Business is ₹599/user/month or ₹6,499/year and adds forecasts, scorecards and the owner command center.
• Billing is per seat in rupees with GST-compliant invoices, and annual billing is available.
• Every paid plan opens with a 14-day full-access trial on Business, sample project preloaded, no card required, enough to connect a real repo and see a few PRs move cards before deciding.

Starting with one team

A studio running multiple projects doesn't need to move everyone onto a new board system in one weekend. A common starting point is one engineering team, connected to a real repo, running a few sprints to see whether the GitHub sync and the forecast actually hold up before content and live-ops teams join the same subscription.

Free covers 5 users and 2 projects indefinitely, which is often enough for a small prototyping team to run on for months before production headcount ramps up and Team becomes the natural next step.