article · 2026-04-16
Kanban Columns for a Game-Dev Pipeline: Software, TODO, and Animation Boards
Three ready-made board layouts inside the Unreal editor — and how to bend them to your team's actual workflow.
Why your columns are the whole board
The hardest part of running a kanban board for a game project is not the cards — it is deciding what the columns should be. Get them right and the board mirrors how work actually moves through your team, so a glance tells you where things are stuck. Get them wrong and you spend more time arguing about which column a card belongs in than you spend shipping. If you are searching for the right kanban columns for a game-development or animation pipeline board, the answer is rarely 'invent your own from scratch' — it is 'start from a layout that already matches your kind of work, then trim'.
Easy Kanban Board docks a visual task board directly inside the Unreal editor, so you plan and track work without alt-tabbing to a separate project-management app. It ships with three pre-configured board templates, each tuned to a different flavour of game-dev work, plus a pre-populated set of demo boards so you can see a populated layout before committing. This article walks through all three column sets, says plainly which one fits which job, and shows how to reshape any of them once your process outgrows the defaults.
Everything below is grounded in what the plugin actually does: the templates, the column controls, and the card fields are the real shipping feature set, not aspirational roadmap. Where a layout is just a starting point you are meant to edit, we say so.
The Default template: a full software pipeline
The Default template lays out six columns in the order work genuinely flows through a coding team: Backlog, then To Do, then In Progress, then Code Review, then Testing, then Done. It is the layout to reach for when your board is tracking features, bugs, and engine-side improvements across a game-development pipeline rather than art or production tasks.
What makes these six columns earn their place is the separation they force. Backlog is the unprioritised pool; To Do is what you have committed to for the current stretch; In Progress is the work-in-flight you can actually count on one hand. The two columns most teams skip — Code Review and Testing — are exactly the ones that keep a game's codebase honest, because a card cannot reach Done by being written, only by being reviewed and verified. On a solo project you might collapse Code Review into Testing; on a team you almost never should.
Because each card carries a multi-line, word-wrapped description plus a priority colour drawn from ten options and any custom tags you add, a Default-template card is enough to hold a real bug report or feature brief rather than a one-line reminder. Drag a card from one column to the next to change its status, with a visual drop-zone showing where it will land.
The TODO template: three columns and nothing else
The TODO template strips the board back to three columns: To Do, In Progress, Done. There is no review gate, no testing lane, no backlog holding pen — just the minimum viable flow. This is the right layout for a solo developer keeping a personal project organised, for a side-jam where ceremony would only slow you down, or for a focused sprint where you have already decided what to build and only need to see what is started and what is finished.
The discipline of three columns is that In Progress is meant to stay short. With nowhere to hide a half-started task, the board nudges you to finish before you fan out. If you find yourself wishing for somewhere to park ideas you are not ready to act on, that is the signal you have outgrown TODO and should move to the Default template or add columns of your own — which the next section covers.
Everything that makes the larger templates useful still applies here: real-time full-text search filters cards by title or description as you type, work auto-saves with debounced writes to a human-readable JSON file under your project's Saved folder, and you can keep multiple boards and switch between them, so a lightweight TODO board can sit alongside a heavier pipeline board in the same project.
The Animation template: a creative pipeline from idea to published
The Animation template trades engineering stages for creative ones, running Ideas, then Research, then Drafting, then Editing, then Review, then Published. It is built for the part of game-dev that is not code — animation work tracked from concept through to final implementation, and more broadly any content-production flow that moves from a rough idea to a finished, shipped artefact.
The shape of these columns tells you something about creative work that the software template does not. Research sits early, before any drafting, because reference-gathering is a stage in its own right, not a footnote. Editing is separated from Drafting so a first pass and its revisions never live in the same lane. And Published, rather than a generic Done, names the actual finish line: the asset is in the build, not merely 'finished' on someone's drive.
This template suits more than literal animation. Use it for asset-production workflows across 3D models, textures, and animations; for VFX authoring runs; or for any creative track where you want the board to reflect the journey from concept to ship. As with every template, treat the column names as a starting point and rename them to your studio's vocabulary.
Customising columns and accent colours
None of the three templates is a cage. Easy Kanban Board supports unlimited custom columns, each with its own accent colour, so you can take any starting layout and reshape it until it matches how your team really works. The most common moves are adding a column the template lacks, reordering the flow, and colour-coding stages so the board reads at a glance.
1. Open Easy Kanban Board from the Tools menu or the Level Editor toolbar; it opens as a docked editor panel. Import one of the three templates as your starting point, or open one of the bundled demo boards.
2. Add a new column with the 'Add Column' toolbar button — for example, insert a 'Blocked' lane into the Default template, or an 'Approved' stage before 'Published' in the Animation template.
3. Reorder columns using the per-column arrow buttons until the left-to-right order matches the real direction work flows in your pipeline.
4. Give each column an accent colour so related stages share a visual family — cool colours for upstream planning, warmer ones as cards approach Done.
5. Create cards in the relevant column, giving each a title, a multi-line description, a priority colour from the ten available, and any tags; then drag them between columns to update status as the work moves.
When you want to share a reshaped board, use JSON import/export: export the board to a file a teammate imports on their machine, which keeps lightweight coordination version-control friendly without standing up an external tool. Your customised columns, colours, and card metadata — including creation and last-modified timestamps — persist across editor sessions via auto-save, so the board you leave is the board you return to.
Wiring the board into the rest of your toolchain
A planning board is most useful when it sits next to the work it describes, which is the whole reason Easy Kanban Board lives inside the editor rather than in a browser tab. The same logic extends to the tools that feed your columns. An Animation-template board, for instance, pairs naturally with content tools: AI Flipbook Generator turns a text prompt into a game-ready Niagara spritesheet, so a card in 'Drafting' can correspond to a concrete VFX generation run rather than an abstract task.
Boards that track lighting or scene-quality tasks can reference measured values instead of opinions — Lumen Meter reads local scene brightness in the editor, so a 'Review' card for a level's lighting can carry a real normalised reading rather than 'looks a bit dark'. And if you drive your UE5 editor with an AI coding agent, Mythic Dev Assist is the bridge that lets that agent observe and act on the live editor, complementing a board that humans use to track intent.
The next step is small: enable Easy Kanban Board, restart the editor, and import whichever of the three templates is closest to your work — Default for code, TODO for solo focus, Animation for creative pipelines — then spend ten minutes renaming columns and assigning accent colours. A board that matches your real flow is the one your team will actually keep open.
The three templates at a glance
| Template | Columns | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Default | Backlog, To Do, In Progress, Code Review, Testing, Done | Tracking features, bugs and improvements across a code-led game pipeline |
| TODO | To Do, In Progress, Done | Solo developers and focused sprints where ceremony slows you down |
| Animation | Ideas, Research, Drafting, Editing, Review, Published | Animation and content production from concept to shipped asset |
Column sets shipped with Easy Kanban Board. Every template is a starting point you can reshape with unlimited custom columns.
FAQ
Which kanban columns should I use for a game-development pipeline board?
For code-led work, start from the Default template: Backlog, To Do, In Progress, Code Review, Testing, Done. It keeps review and testing as explicit gates so a card only reaches Done after it has been verified, not just written. For a creative or animation pipeline, the Animation template (Ideas, Research, Drafting, Editing, Review, Published) is the better fit.
Can I change the columns after picking a template?
Yes. Every template is only a starting point. Easy Kanban Board supports unlimited custom columns, each with its own accent colour, and you can reorder them with per-column arrow buttons. Add a 'Blocked' lane, rename stages to your studio's vocabulary, or collapse two columns into one — the board adapts to your process.
How do I share a board with a teammate?
Use the JSON import/export feature. Export the board to a human-readable JSON file that a teammate imports on their machine. Because the format is version-control friendly, you can keep boards alongside your project for lightweight coordination without standing up an external project-management tool.
Does the board run inside the Unreal editor, and does it affect my packaged game?
It runs as a docked panel inside the UE5 editor, opened from the Tools menu or the Level Editor toolbar. It is an editor-only plugin, so it adds zero runtime overhead to your packaged game, and each project keeps its own board data saved under the project's Saved folder.
What Unreal Engine version does Easy Kanban Board need?
Unreal Engine 5.5 and newer. The shipped plugin targets 5.5+, with packaged builds available for 5.5, 5.6, and 5.7, on Windows 64-bit.
Easy Kanban Board
Plan features and track work without leaving your project. A simple, fast Kanban board docked right in the Unreal editor — columns, cards and drag-to-move.
