How to Run a Kanban Board Inside the Unreal Engine Editor

Why an in-editor board beats Alt-Tabbing to Trello

Every time you Alt-Tab from the Unreal editor to a browser tab to update a card, you pay a small tax: the context switch, the wait for a web app to load, the temptation to read one more notification. Over a working day those taxes add up, and the board you swore you would keep current quietly goes stale. The whole point of running a task board or kanban inside the Unreal editor is to make updating your plan a one-second action that happens where the work already is.

Easy Kanban Board is an editor-only UE5 plugin that docks a visual kanban directly inside the Unreal editor. You get columns, drag-and-drop cards, priority colours, tags, and real-time search, all rendered as a native Slate panel that matches the dark editor theme. Because it is editor-only it has zero runtime overhead, and each project keeps its own board data on disk, so your level-design tasks travel with the project that owns them.

Under the hood the plugin is built as a Slate UI layer sitting on top of a pure C++20 core library with versioned JSON serialization, which is why the board is fast to open and its saved data is plain, version-control-friendly text rather than an opaque binary blob.

Installing and opening the board

1. Install Easy Kanban Board from Fab and let it download into your engine, then fully restart Unreal Engine so the editor picks up the new plugin.

2. Open your project. The plugin loads during the PostEngineInit phase, so the board is ready as soon as the editor finishes starting.

3. Open the board itself in one of two ways: choose 'Easy Kanban Board' from the 'Tools' menu, or click its entry on the Level Editor toolbar. It opens as a docked editor panel that you can drag into any tab well alongside the Outliner or Content Browser.

The plugin ships with pre-populated demo boards, so the panel is not an empty grid the first time you open it. That gives you something to drag, edit, and delete while you learn the controls before committing to your own layout.

Starting from a template

Rather than building columns from nothing, start from one of the three pre-configured templates the plugin includes. The Default template models a software pipeline as Backlog, To Do, In Progress, Code Review, Testing, then Done. The TODO template is a minimal To Do, In Progress, Done. The Animation template tracks a content pipeline as Ideas, Research, Drafting, Editing, Review, then Published.

Import the template that most resembles how your team already thinks about work, then customise it. The Default board suits a feature-and-bug pipeline; the Animation board maps cleanly onto asset production where work flows from concept to a finished, published asset. Picking a close starting point means you spend your first session naming work, not architecting columns.

Columns are not fixed. You can add unlimited custom columns with the 'Add Column' toolbar button, give each one its own accent colour, and reorder them with the per-column arrow buttons until the left-to-right flow matches your real process.

Columns, cards, tags, and priority colours

A card is the atom of the board. Each one carries a title, a multi-line description that word-wraps so longer notes stay readable, a priority colour chosen from ten options, and any custom tags you add. Use the title for the one-line summary, the description for acceptance criteria or repro steps, the priority colour to make the urgent work visually jump out of the column, and tags to slice the board by area, for example a 'lighting' or 'audio' tag.

Cards also track metadata for you. Each card records its creation timestamp and a last-modified time, and that metadata is persisted across editor sessions, so when you reopen the project days later the board remembers when each piece of work appeared and when it last changed.

When a board grows past a screenful, the real-time search box becomes the fastest way to navigate it. Type a few characters and the board filters cards by title or description as you type, backed by a dedicated search-index core class, so finding 'the card about the broken nav mesh' is a matter of typing 'nav' rather than scrolling.

You can also tune the panel to taste: pick a font family from Urbanist, Roboto, Arial, or Courier New, and adjust the font size, so a board you stare at all day reads comfortably.

Drag-and-drop status changes

Changing a card's status is the action you will perform most, and it is deliberately the simplest. Grab a card and drag it to another column to move it; the board shows visual drop-zone feedback so you can see exactly where the card will land before you release. Moving a card from 'In Progress' to 'Code Review' is a single gesture, with no form to fill in and no page to reload.

That immediacy is the entire argument for an in-editor board. The cost of keeping the plan honest drops low enough that you actually do it: finish a task, drag it to Done, and carry on building, all without leaving the editor you were already working in.

Auto-save and where your data lives

You do not have to remember to save. The board auto-saves using dirty tracking with debounced writes, handled by dedicated tracker and auto-saver core classes, so changes are written shortly after you make them rather than on every keystroke. The dirty-tracking part means the plugin only writes when something actually changed, keeping disk churn down.

Your data is stored as human-readable JSON under the project's Saved folder, in a file such as Saved/KanbanBoard.json. The serialization uses a versioned schema, and because the format is plain text it is genuinely version-control friendly: you can diff a board change in your VCS and see which cards moved. You can also choose custom save locations, or maintain multiple boards and switch quickly between them when one project needs several views of its work.

To collaborate, use JSON import and export. Export a board to a JSON file, hand it to a teammate, and they import it on their machine to see the same columns and cards. This is lightweight, file-based coordination rather than a live multi-user server, which keeps the plugin simple and your data entirely under your own control.

Once your plan lives inside the editor, the natural next step is to bring the rest of your iteration loop in too. If you want an AI coding agent to actually drive and observe that same editor, Mythic Dev Assist exposes a glass-box bridge for exactly that; if you are knocking out VFX tasks on the board, AI Flipbook Generator turns a prompt into a Niagara spritesheet, and Lumen Meter reads local scene brightness without leaving the editor. Install Easy Kanban Board first, import a template, and you will have a living plan docked next to your work before lunch.

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