Your whiteboard is already a backlog
That photo of the level design whiteboard is a plan trapped in a JPEG. Aligned turns it into Jira tickets before the marker dries.
Every game studio has the same graveyard: a camera roll full of whiteboard photos. The boss fight breakdown from Tuesday. The level flow diagram with three arrows and somebody's coffee ring. The "we finally agreed on the combat loop" board that got erased ten minutes after the photo.
Those photos are plans. Real ones, often the best ones, because whiteboard sessions are where teams actually think. And then the plan gets trapped in a JPEG that nobody opens again, and two weeks later someone asks "wait, what did we decide about the arena?"
The gap between the whiteboard and the backlog is where good decisions go to die.
Photo in, tickets out
With Aligned, the photo is the input:
- Drop the photo in. Whiteboard, notebook page, a sticky-note wall, a napkin if the handwriting survives.
- It reads the mess. Marker handwriting, boxes, columns, half-finished lists. What comes out is structured draft work, grouped the way the board grouped it.
- You review the draft. Fix estimates, assign owners, delete the box that was actually a joke. Nothing is final until you say so.
- Sync to Jira. The board you erased at 3 pm is a set of real tickets by 3:05.
No retyping. No "I'll write these up later." Later is where the plan was dying.
What this looks like in practice
Picture a typical level design breakdown: a boss arena sketched in the middle of the board, task boxes radiating out. Encounter scripting, camera volumes, art pass, audio hooks. Call it fourteen boxes.
Typing those into Jira by hand is a solid 20 to 30 minutes of somebody's afternoon, and it always happens hours later, when half the nuance is gone. From the photo it is a draft in about a minute, a couple of minutes of review, and then real tickets.
That is the entire product philosophy in one feature. The thinking already happened. Capture it where it happened, in the form it happened in, and stop making humans re-enter their own decisions.
Try the engine behind it
The same planning engine runs our free backlog generator. Type what you are building, get a sprint-ready backlog in about a minute, no account needed. If that feels like magic, the photo version feels like cheating.
Take the photo. Skip the retyping.