Pin your references, map your whole production as a living network of tasks, milestones and bugs, and build it with your team live, all on one infinite canvas that can float on top of your engine.
Game production lives in three places at once: a folder of reference images, a task list, and the plan in your head of what unlocks what. Venom Board puts all three on a single canvas.
- It's a reference board like PureRef, and it opens your PureRef boards: paste screenshots, drop in concept art, scribble over it with markers.
- It's a roadmap with real planning data: phases, milestones, estimates, priorities, due dates and bugs.
- It's a dependency network: drag a tendril from one card to the next and the board works out what's blocked and what's ready to start.
- It's a schedule: the timeline turns your estimates and links into a critical path and a finish date, and the Planner tracks a burndown to your next milestone.
- It's multiplayer: make a free account at venomboard.com, invite your team and edit shared projects together live, with comments, @mentions and assignments.
- It connects to your tools: anything that supports the Model Context Protocol (MCP) can work on a team board the way you do, from mapping out a project to laying out references.
- It's a public roadmap: publish a page your players can follow and vote on, straight from the board.
- It's jam-ready: a countdown, the theme, and a scope check that tells you what to cut before the deadline does.
- It's an overlay: pin it on top of Unreal, Unity or Godot, turn the opacity down, and let clicks pass straight through to your engine.
Solo boards need no account, no subscription and no telemetry. They work offline, and they're plain .json files you can back up or commit to your game's repo.
| Windows | Download VenomBoard-Setup-1.9.0.exe from the latest release and run it. It installs for your Windows account in a few seconds (no admin rights needed) and adds Start menu and desktop shortcuts. It keeps itself up to date: new versions download in the background and install when you restart. |
| macOS | Download VenomBoard-1.9.0-mac.zip (Apple silicon and Intel), open it (Safari unzips it for you) and drag Venom Board into Applications. When a new version is out, Get 1.x.x appears in the top bar. |
| Linux | Download VenomBoard-1.9.0.AppImage, make it executable (chmod +x VenomBoard-1.9.0.AppImage, or Properties → Allow executing) and run it. It keeps itself up to date like the Windows app. |
| Browser | Use the web app at venomboard.com/app, try it on itch.io, or download VenomBoard-1.9.0-web.zip, unzip it and open index.html in Chrome, Edge or Firefox. Pin on top, click-through and window opacity need a desktop app. |
Windows SmartScreen: the installer isn't code-signed yet, so Windows may show "Windows protected your PC" the first time. Click More info → Run anyway. Updates after that install without the warning.
macOS: the app isn't notarized by Apple yet, so the first time you open it macOS says it can't check it. Click Done, then open System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down and click Open Anyway next to Venom Board. On macOS 14 and older you can instead Control-click the app and choose Open. After that it opens normally.
Coming from 1.0.0? The 1.0.0 zip version can't update itself. Install the new version once and you'll get every update after that automatically. Your boards carry over.
- Infinite canvas: the mouse wheel zooms at the cursor, Space or middle-drag pans, and there's a minimap for big boards
- Paste screenshots with
Ctrl+V, drag images in from Explorer or a browser, flip, greyscale or reset to original size - Screenshot tool with
Alt+Shift+S: drag over any part of the screen and it lands on the board. In the desktop app it works from any app, like a dedicated screenshot tool:- an area, the whole screen (
F), one window (W) or the last area (L), with a pixel magnifier and colour picker (C) - draw on it: pen, highlighter, arrows, lines, boxes, ellipses, text, numbered steps, pixelate and a solid hide box, with undo
- then put it on the board (
Enter), copy it (Ctrl+C), save it (Ctrl+S), pin it on top of every window (Ctrl+P) or get a short link (Ctrl+L)
- an area, the whole screen (
- Screenshot links: any screenshot or picture on a board becomes a short
venomboard.com/s/…link anyone can open, with location and camera details taken out first. Manage yours in Settings → Account - Copy a picture with
Ctrl+C(or right-click → Copy image) to paste it into any other app, as it shows on the board - Marker (8 colours + custom), highlighter and eraser. Ink drawn on a card or image moves with it
- Snap guides, align, distribute, pack into a grid, lock items, bring to front or send to back
- Videos and GIFs as references: GIFs animate on the board, video files play on hover or double-click (loop, autoplay, sound), and YouTube or Vimeo links become players that only load when you click them
- Import PureRef boards: drop a
.purfile (PureRef 1.x or 2.x) on the board or use Import. Pictures keep their places, sizes, rotation, flips and crops, notes become text and groups become frames, placed next to what's already there - Replace a picture or video with another file or link (right-click → Replace, or ⇄ in its toolbar). It keeps its place, width, connectors and settings, takes the new shape, and a picture can become a YouTube, Vimeo or video file and back
- Crop and rotate pictures without re-encoding them, pick any colour off a picture with the colour picker (
K), and extract a palette of its main colours as swatches with hex codes - Export the whole board or just the selection as a 2× PNG, or as a PureRef board (
.pur) with crops, turns and flips intact - Timelapse: turn a board's history into a video of it coming together (landscape, square or vertical, saved as MP4 or WebM), ready for #screenshotsaturday, TikTok or Shorts. Team projects use their version history; boards on your computer keep a snapshot every 20 minutes of work
- Four card types: Task, Milestone, Bug (crash / major / minor / polish) and Idea note
- Status, discipline (Code, Art, Design, Level, Audio, UI/UX, VFX, Narrative, QA, Tech/build, Marketing), MoSCoW priority for scope cuts, estimates (
4h,2d,1w) and due dates that turn red when overdue - Checklists inside notes: any line starting with
[ ]becomes a clickable checkbox, with progress on the card - Tendril connectors: curved, straight, elbow or circuit (straight runs with 45° bends, like Electric Nodes in Unreal), with arrowheads, dashes, labels and an animated flow. Right-click a wire to add reroute points and drag them to route your noodles tidily (they snap into line with their neighbours); double-click one to remove it. Right-click the board → Style every connector switches every wire at once. Wires that share a side or a corridor spread apart so none hides another, and card pins let you drag a connection from either edge of a card, Blueprint-style
- Tidy layout: lay cards out left to right by what they wait on, with fewer crossings, for the selection, one phase or the whole board
- Place next: drag a connector out of a card into empty space and choose what comes next, Blueprint-style.
Tabadds the next connected task instantly - Dependency awareness: cards show waits on N while anything feeding into them is unfinished, the Ready to start filter lists what you can pick up today, and Trace highlights a card's whole chain of dependencies
- Connect phases like cards: drag the dot on a phase's side to the next phase (or onto empty space for a new one lined up beside it), and everything in the next phase waits on the work in this one, in the schedule, the Timeline, Trace and Ready to start
- Phase frames carry everything inside them when moved and show finished tasks, progress and remaining estimate in their header. Collapse a phase to its title bar to hide what's inside, or make it a sprint with dates and capacity per teammate, with progress, capacity and velocity in the Planner
- Planner panel (
Ctrl+F): percent done, ready count, days of work left, open bugs, overdue items, milestone countdowns, a burndown chart to the next milestone, search and filters (including Mine) that dim the rest of the board - Timeline (
Shift+G): every task scheduled in working days from its estimate and what it waits on, with the critical path that decides your finish date, due dates you'll miss, and finished work. Arrows show what waits on what and each bar fills with the time tracked on it. Click a task to change its status, estimate, dates and people in place; drag a whole bar to give it a start date (everything after it moves along), drag its end to change its estimate, or a milestone to move its date. Add task puts a new card straight into a phase, and on team boards you can show just one person's tasks - Hours (
Shift+H): a day or a week hour by hour, like a calendar. Drag across empty hours to plan time on a task (striped, and it can be ahead) or log time you've worked (solid, and it counts on the card), then drag blocks to move them or their edge to resize them. Pick out one task to see only its time; a running timer shows live - Kanban (
Shift+K) and Calendar (Shift+C) views of the same cards: drag between status columns to change status, or between days to change due dates - Time tracking (
Shift+T): log how long you worked on any task, or run a timer. On team boards each entry belongs to whoever logged it, a weekly Timesheet (Shift+W) shows everyone's time by day with a CSV export, and tracked time shows against the estimate on the card and in the Planner - Tags and saved filters: tag cards, filter the Planner by tag, and save sets of filters to pick again
- Import from Trello (JSON export), Jira (CSV export) or any spreadsheet saved as CSV: lists, sprints or statuses become phases, with statuses, priorities, estimates, due dates and checklists carried over
- Search everything (
Ctrl+Shift+F): every board on this computer and every team project you're in, at once - 12 game-dev templates: game roadmap, feature, level and character pipelines, vertical slice, weekly sprint board, bug triage, playtest loop, 48-hour game jam, Steam launch, a design-doc outline and an art moodboard. Browse them at venomboard.com/templates and open one in a click
- Game jam clock: the deadline counting down on the board and in the top bar, the theme (or when it's revealed), a scope check of the work left against the time you have, and Cut scope to drop the lowest-priority work until it fits, with reminders as the deadline nears
- Export to Markdown (GitHub, Notion, Discord) and CSV (Sheets, Jira, Trello)
- Board lock: a view-only mode for reviews and sharing, so nothing gets nudged by accident
- Free accounts at venomboard.com. Sign in from the Team panel in the desktop app or the web app
- Teams with a leader, team admins, editors and viewers. Invite people by username or email; they accept from the app or the website. Admins can give someone a different role in one project
- Shared projects: each team has a project list. Share this board turns any board into a team project
- Live editing: every card, connector, frame, image, ink stroke and text appears for everyone as it happens, including drags, resizes and typing in progress
- Always up to date: the Team panel shows new, renamed and deleted projects, answered invites and people joining, leaving or changing role the moment it happens, and notifications arrive straight away, even between projects. An invite that arrives while you work says so
- Presence: teammates' avatars in the top bar, their cursors and selections on the canvas, and is typing… labels
- Assign cards to teammates: their avatars on the card, Mine in the Planner, and a notification for whoever you assign
- Comments and @mentions on every card, live, with suggestions as you type, replies, reactions and threads you can resolve. Drop numbered feedback pins on a spot of a picture for art reviews. Viewers can comment too, so reviewers and playtesters can leave feedback
- Notifications: the bell shows mentions and assignments and opens the card for you; mentions and a morning list of your tasks due soon can come by email (each can be turned off)
- Activity feed: who added, finished, deleted or commented on what, gathered into readable lines
- Follow a teammate's view by clicking their avatar, or present (editors and up) so everyone in the project follows you
- Version history: the board is kept before each burst of editing, plus versions you name; restore any of them for everyone, or open one as a copy
- View-only links: anyone with the link can watch a board live without an account, without seeing who's there or changing anything. Posted on Discord, Reddit or X, a link shows a picture of the board
- Public roadmaps: a page your players can follow, with your phases, what's planned, in progress and done, milestone dates, votes on what they want most, an RSS feed and an embed for your own site. Pictures, comments, people and estimates are never shown, and any card can be kept off it
- Discord and Slack: post finished tasks, reached milestones, comments, restores and new members to a channel
- GitHub and GitLab: mention a card's reference (
VB-…) in a commit, pull request or merge request and it comments on the card; "fixes VB-…" finishes it - Playtest feedback form and in-game bug reporter: playtesters and your game send bugs and ideas straight onto the board as cards, screenshots included. Code for Godot, Unity, Unreal and curl is in
integrations/bug-reporter - Calendar feed: your due dates and milestones in Google Calendar, Outlook or Apple Calendar
- Engine panels: your tasks inside Unreal Engine, Unity and Godot. See
integrations - Connect tools (MCP): assistants and planning tools that support the Model Context Protocol can work on your team boards the way you do. They plan (projects from templates, phases, cards with estimates, priorities, disciplines and assignees, dependencies, the schedule and critical path, comments) and lay out the board (text, frames, pictures and GIFs from the web or your computer, YouTube and Vimeo videos, replacing pictures and videos, marker and highlighter ink, connectors, a game jam clock, moving, aligning, duplicating and stacking), and they can save and restore versions. They act as you, with your role in each team, and what they change shows up live for everyone and stays in version history. Make an access token at venomboard.com/account (Settings → Account → Connect tools has a link); changing your password or signing out everywhere revokes every token
- Viewers watch live without being able to change anything
- Account settings (
Ctrl+,): change your display name, your cursor colour and your password, turn on two-step sign-in with an authenticator app (with recovery codes), see where you're signed in and sign out everywhere else, or delete your account
- Pin on top and an opacity slider in the top bar
- Click-through: clicks pass straight through the board to the app underneath. Turn it off from anywhere with a global shortcut (default
Ctrl+Shift+X, customisable) or the tray icon - Lock window in place, hide the top bar, or hide the whole interface with
\ - Automatic updates: the app checks for new versions when it starts, downloads them in the background and installs them when you restart. Restart to update appears in the top bar when one is ready, and Check for updates is in the Window menu. Every update is checked against Venom Board's update signature before it installs
- Right-click anywhere for the Window menu. Every window option is also in Settings (
Ctrl+,) - Two skins: Venom (dark) and Anti-Venom (light)
- Track time on tasks: type how long you worked (3h 20m) or run a timer, see today's total, everyone's entries by day and who worked on what, a weekly timesheet per person, and export it all as CSV. The Timeline's Hours view shows the day hour by hour, like a calendar
- Every feature one click away: the tool spine has buttons for Screenshot, Kanban, Calendar, Timeline and Search everything, and More features for the Planner, templates, the game jam clock, Tidy layout, timelapses and import. Hover any tool to see its name, keys and what it does
- Fits any screen: on small or low-resolution screens the top bar folds its least-used buttons into a ⋯ menu and the tool spine compacts, and View → Interface size (80–150%) scales everything up or down
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| Sprints and tidy wiring · a phase as a sprint, a finished phase folded away, circuit wires, tags and tracked time | Kanban · the same cards by status; drag them along. Calendar shows them by due date |
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| Feedback pins · comments pinned to a spot on a picture, with replies and resolving | Sprint planning · work left, capacity per person, velocity and tag filters |
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| Comments and @mentions · talk right on the card; teammates' cursors and selections show live | Planner · progress, a burndown to the next milestone, and filters that dim the rest of the board |
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| Timeline · every task scheduled from its estimate and what it waits on, with the critical path. Click a task to change it, drag a bar to give it a start date | Hours · the week hour by hour: drag across it to plan time or log what you worked. Striped is planned, solid is tracked |
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| Game jam clock · the countdown, the theme, a scope check and Cut scope | Templates · twelve ready-made game production structures |
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| Cards · discipline, priority, estimates, due dates, checklists and dependencies | Place next · drag a tendril into empty space to choose the next card |
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| Boards on your computer · the sample roadmap, no account needed | Overlay controls · pin, lock, click-through, opacity, board lock |
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| Anti-Venom · the light skin | Public roadmap · a page players follow and vote on, made from your board |
| Tools | Views and time | ||
|---|---|---|---|
V |
Select and move | Shift+G |
Timeline |
G / hold Space |
Pan | Shift+H |
Hours, a day or week hour by hour |
P / H / E |
Marker, highlighter, eraser | Shift+K / Shift+C |
Kanban / Calendar |
N |
Card | Shift+T |
Track time |
T |
Text | Shift+W |
Timesheet |
A / C |
Connector | Ctrl+F |
Planner search and filters |
F |
Phase frame | Ctrl+Shift+F |
Search every board and project |
I |
Insert image or video | Esc |
Back to the board |
| Planning | Timeline and Hours | ||
|---|---|---|---|
Tab |
Add a connected task | Click a task | Change its status, estimate, dates and people |
Enter |
Edit the selected card | Drag a bar | Move when it starts (its end: the estimate) |
PgDn / PgUp |
Fly between phases | Drag across hours | Plan or log time on a task |
Shift+1 / Shift+2 |
Fit board / fit selection | ← / → |
The day or week before or after |
Ctrl+Shift+K / Ctrl+Shift+L |
Lock the board / selected items | T |
Back to today |
K |
Colour picker | D / W |
One day / the whole week |
| Editing | Window (desktop) | ||
|---|---|---|---|
Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Shift+Z |
Undo / redo (or Ctrl+Y) |
Ctrl+Shift+A |
Pin on top |
Ctrl+C X V D |
Copy, cut, paste, duplicate | Ctrl+Shift+X |
Click-through on / off |
Alt+drag |
Duplicate while dragging | Ctrl+Shift+B |
Hide the top bar |
Alt+Shift+S |
Screenshot an area onto the board | Alt+Shift+S |
The same, from any app |
Ctrl+drag |
Move without snapping | \ |
Hide the whole interface |
1–8, [ ] |
Ink colour, brush size | Ctrl+S / Ctrl+O / Ctrl+E |
Save, open, export PNG |
Ctrl+, |
Settings | ? |
All the shortcuts |
Press ? inside the app for the full list.
- Boards autosave locally, and you can keep as many boards as you like.
- Save writes a
.venomboard.jsonfile containing the board and its images. Use it for backups, to move boards between computers, or to commit next to your project. - The desktop app and a browser keep separate local storage; use Save and Open to move boards between them.
- Solo boards never leave your machine, videos included. Team projects, with their comments and versions, are stored on venomboard.com so everyone in the team can open them.
Requires Node.js 22 or newer.
git clone https://github.com/1337VIPER/venom-board.git
cd venom-board
npm install
npm startThe first npm start downloads the Electron runtime. To build the Windows installer in dist/:
npm run distThe Linux AppImage and the macOS app are built on those systems with npx electron-builder --linux AppImage and npx electron-builder --mac zip --universal. Release builds run in GitHub Actions, and node tools/check-build.js <run id> checks them against a build of the same commit on your own computer before the AppImage is signed with node tools/sign-update.js.
index.html the entire app: UI, canvas engine, planner, timeline, templates, team client and export
electron/ desktop shell: window, pin, opacity, click-through, file dialogs and signed updates
dev/ self-test and screenshot generator used during development
tools/ release checks: check-build.js and sign-update.js
.github/ the workflow that builds the Linux and macOS apps
assets/ app icon
docs/ banner, screenshots and template pictures
Because the whole app is one HTML file, the browser version and the desktop app always behave the same.
Join the Venom Board Discord, a community of game developers, artists and teams: show what you're making, find a team, get help, and help shape the app.
New versions and features are posted on Venom Board's official accounts:
- Discord: venomboard.com/discord (releases in #announcements)
- Bluesky: @venomboard.bsky.social
- X: @Venomboardapp
- Reddit: u/Venomboard
These are the only official accounts. They're also listed at the bottom of every page on venomboard.com.
Bug reports and feature ideas are very welcome. Open an issue and tell us how you plan your games, or talk it through on the Discord first. Pull requests are welcome too. Please keep changes focused and describe what you tested.
Venom Board is created by 1337VIPER.
The concept, the feature set, the workflow and the Venom visual direction all come from 1337VIPER's own ideas: a single board where game developers can collect references, plan production and keep it floating over their engine while they work.
MIT © 2026 1337VIPER. Free to use, modify and share.