How to Share a Game-Dev Kanban Board with Your Team via JSON Export

The problem: a task board trapped on one machine

You planned your whole sprint inside the editor, dragged a dozen cards into 'In Progress', then realised your teammate cannot see any of it. Most in-editor planning tools keep their state in an opaque save that lives on one machine, which means a board is only ever as useful as the one person looking at it. The moment you want to hand work off, you are back to screenshots in chat or a parallel copy of everything in some external app.

Easy Kanban Board solves this the boring, reliable way: it stores every board as human-readable JSON, and it ships a direct JSON import/export so you can share a board with a teammate without a server, an account, or a sync service. This tutorial walks through exporting a board, importing it on another machine, and the part most teams miss, committing the board to version control so it travels with the project itself.

If you want to share a kanban board with your team and keep your task board under version control, the key is that the on-disk format is plain text. That single design choice is what makes everything below possible.

Why JSON beats a binary save

Easy Kanban Board serialises boards with a versioned JSON schema built on the nlohmann/json library, and the storage format is deliberately human-readable and version-control friendly. That matters for three concrete reasons.

First, you can actually read it. A card is just an object with a title, a multi-line description, a priority colour, tags, and creation and last-modified timestamps; a column is an object with a title, an accent colour, and its list of cards. If something looks wrong after an import, you can open the file in any text editor and see exactly what the board contains rather than guessing at a binary blob.

Second, it diffs cleanly. Because the format is text with a stable schema, your version-control system can show you line-by-line what changed between two states of the board, which is impossible with a binary save. A reviewer can see that a card moved columns or that a description was edited.

Third, it is portable. The same JSON loads on any machine running the plugin, so the export you hand to a teammate is the whole board, not a pointer to local state. There is no hidden database to migrate.

Exporting a board

Open your project and launch Easy Kanban Board from the Tools menu or the Level Editor toolbar. It opens as a docked editor panel, so you can keep it visible while you work.

1. Get the board into the state you want to share. Add or tidy columns with the 'Add Column' toolbar button, reorder them with the arrow buttons, and drag cards into the right columns so the export reflects reality.

2. If you keep multiple boards, switch to the specific board you intend to hand off, so you export the right one rather than whatever was last open.

3. Trigger the JSON export from the board's controls. This writes the current board to a standalone JSON file. Because the plugin supports custom save locations, you can point the export at a shared drive or a folder inside your repository rather than burying it under the project's Saved directory.

4. Confirm the file before you send it. Open it in a text editor and check that the columns and cards you expect are present. Since the format is human-readable, this takes seconds and catches the occasional 'I exported the wrong board' mistake.

Importing on a teammate's machine

On the receiving side, your teammate needs Easy Kanban Board installed and the editor restarted so the plugin loads. The plugin is editor-only, so this adds zero runtime overhead to the game itself.

1. Open Easy Kanban Board from the Tools menu or toolbar in their project.

2. Use the JSON import to load the file you exported. The board comes in complete, with every column, every card, the priority colours, the tags, and the creation and last-modified timestamps preserved, because all of that is captured in the serialised schema.

3. From here the board behaves like any other: they can drag cards between columns to update status, edit descriptions, filter with the real-time search box, and the work auto-saves with dirty tracking to their own project's board data.

Keep in mind that each project keeps its own board data, so importing on a teammate's machine gives them an independent copy rather than a live shared session. For lightweight coordination, agree on who owns the canonical board, or use version control (below) so there is one source of truth everyone pulls from.

Committing the board to version control

The most durable way to share a board is to stop emailing files around and let your repository carry it. Because the storage format is human-readable and version-control friendly, you can commit the board JSON alongside your code and content.

1. Export (or save) the board to a path inside your working tree rather than only under Saved, using the custom save location support. A predictable folder, for example a Docs or Planning directory at the project root, keeps it easy to find.

2. Add and commit that JSON file like any other source artefact. Now the board is part of the project's history.

3. When a teammate pulls the latest changes, they get the current board. They import it into Easy Kanban Board, and everyone is looking at the same plan. When the board changes, the diff in your pull request shows exactly which cards moved or were edited, so board changes get reviewed alongside the work they describe.

This is the payoff of a plain-text schema: the task board lives where the rest of the project lives, travels with every clone, and has a full audited history instead of existing only on whoever set it up.

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