Free
€0
After trial · 1 project · no time limit
- Backward planning for 1 game
- Phases, milestones, items (features & bugs)
- MoSCoW Kanban per phase
Video game project management software: hit the date without crunch
Your ship date won't move; your scope will. Demo, launch or publisher milestone: the date is set. Orchesia helps studios plan backward from it and arbitrate features and bugs by priority.
Three situations that derail a game project before ship
Scope that never stops growing
Features get added as ideas come in, with no arbitration. The date approaches, the game is never "done", and scope has never been decided.
Realizing too late that you won't be ready
Milestones (vertical slice, alpha, beta) and priorities are not set upfront. As the demo or ship date approaches, too much is left to do.
Crunch as the only adjustment variable
Without backward planning or clear priorities, hitting the date means overtime. The team burns out and quality suffers.
What Orchesia gives you
Solutions built for the way your teams actually work
Phases, built backward from the ship date
Break development into phases: prototype, vertical slice, production, alpha, beta, ship. Working back from the date (launch, demo, publisher milestone), these phases form the backbone of the backward plan, shared across the whole team.
Items = your features and bugs
In each phase, create your items: features to develop, bugs to fix, assets to produce. Estimate the workload for each and distribute it across the team. Nothing gets lost in a forgotten to-do.
Workload distributed by sprint
Organize your items in cycles — your sprints — and visualize workload week by week. You spot overloaded sprints before they force crunch.
Visual tracking: Kanban and charts
Manage features and bugs on a Kanban board (Must, Should, Could, Won't) and track progress with customizable charts. Each phase's status is readable at a glance.
Organize your development backward, from the ship date
Three steps to build your backward plan, from scoping to tracking.
Set your phases through to ship
The date is known (launch, demo, publisher milestone): place your phases on the calendar (prototype, vertical slice, production, alpha, beta) working back from the date. This is the core of the visual backward plan, in a tool built for the project.
Create and prioritize features and bugs
In each phase, create your items (features, bugs, tasks) then prioritize them with a decision-support board (Must, Should, Could, Won't). The team knows what must absolutely be in the build and what can be cut.
Manage multiple games, by sprints
Once you're coordinating multiple projects in the same workspace, cycles (your sprints) let you plan cross-project work: assign people and their hours per week, move items by drag and drop, and see at a glance whether workload holds against team capacity. Build as many custom charts as you need to track velocity and progress.
What fits in the next production cycle
The multi-project backlog feeds cycles whose gauge shows available capacity. A feature that does not fit shows up when you assign it, not at the sprint review.
Art, code and design: who is taken, and until when
Cross-discipline dependencies are the first cause of blockage in production. The workload view shows people committed to other tracks, absences included, before the asset is due.
Publisher milestones frozen, variance measured
Alpha, beta, gold: record the schedule as committed to the publisher or funder. At each checkpoint, the variance is dated and attributable to a specific task.
Avant
Without backward planning or priorities
Development moves forward without a clear course.
- Scope creeping, features added without arbitration
- Milestones (vertical slice, alpha, beta) never set
- Unclear priorities between features and bugs
- Workload never compared to team capacity
- End-of-production crunch as the only way out
Apres
With Orchesia
Development advances backward from the date.
- Date (ship, demo, milestone) set as the anchor
- Phases and milestones visible working back from ship
- Features and bugs prioritized (Must, Should, Could, Won't)
- Workload anticipated sprint by sprint
- Ship date met by arbitrating scope, not sacrificing the team
Budgets slip as often as schedules
And for the same reason: what was estimated before kickoff, not what was tracked after.
- 43%
of projects finish with a variance against the original budget
PMI, Pulse of the Profession 2018, 4,455 practitioners - 28%
of failed projects cite inadequate cost estimation
PMI, Pulse of the Profession 2018 - 67% vs 46%
mature organisations meet the original budget, against immature ones
PMI, Pulse of the Profession 2020
Run your game production for free
30-day free trial · No commitment · No credit card
At the end of the trial, continue free on a simplified project, or choose a paid plan for multiple projects and structured mode.
Paid plans
From€15/month
For multi-project studios and large scopes
- Multiple projects
- Structured mode (WBS, PERT, Gantt)
- AI credits
- Multi-seat collaboration
Frequently asked questions
No. You can build backward planning for one game for free (a simplified project), without a credit card. Advanced features (multiple projects, structured mode, AI) are on paid plans.
Yes. A cycle is a work period (your sprint) on which you plan workload, distribute items, and track progress.
No. Orchesia is for scoping and planning production: backward planning, phases, milestones, feature and bug prioritization. It centralizes planning and priorities without replacing fine-grained ticket tracking or your engine.
Yes: start from the ship date (or demo date) and organize backward into phases and milestones. Learn more about backward planning.
Yes. Simplified mode (backward planning) covers the majority of projects with a fixed date; structured mode serves large scopes where the date is calculated from content.
A few hours. The tool is built on concepts familiar to studios: phases, milestones, sprints, feature and bug prioritization.
Further reading
The methods behind the tool, explained in detail.
Scope creep: why projects grow without anyone decidingScope creep is rarely a single bad decision. It is the accumulation of small additions nobody logged, on a scope that was never fully written down.
What is the critical path in project management?The critical path is the longest chain of dependent tasks in a project. It sets the minimum duration — and any delay on it moves the end date.
Your date is set. Your scope can be too.
Set phases, milestones, and priorities for one game, for free. Upgrade to paid plans for multiple projects and structured mode.
30-day free trial • No commitment • No credit card