When it comes to managing the design and development of games/software/digital tools there are so many products out there that enable to you work more effectively and efficiently. For this this jam, I went with old faithful, Trello.

What is Trello?

If you haven't used it before, Trello is a free and super intuitive web-based kanban board-styled tool. Trello allows you to organise your ideas into 'boards', which you can then add 'buckets' (columns) with nested 'cards' under them. I use Trello a lot in collaborative meetings at work, but it's also really useful for very quickly mapping out ideas across a wide range of topics.

Here's a look at the board I set up for The Plant Shop.

How I organised my board

After reading the theme and mapping out some initial thoughts and ideas on paper, I headed to Trello to start collating and fleshing these themes out somewhat more. Getting this content down in a more structured way really helps focus your development and what you're aiming to create. I also added a design + development checklist to the far left of the board to help me keep track of my feature and design goals which I then marked off (red - didn't complete, yellow - in progress, green - completed).

Since submitting my game, I've been using the same board to collate user feedback and feature requests, which i'll then synthesise and flesh out to then update the game at a later date.

How did you do it?

How did you manage your development for this jam? I'd love to know.

If you want to check out The Plant Shop, click here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/the-plant-shop