Does your current system for keeping track of tasks have a ring on it from your coffee cup? Upgrade to a system that really helps.

Are you tired of subscriptions chewing through your development budget? Buy RefractTrack once, use it without it costing more money over time, even when new versions come out.

The board your team will actually keep open

Refract Odyssey Studio needed a tracker that felt like it was built for a small game team — not a boxed-up enterprise tool with fifty menus for the ten things people actually do all day.

RefractTrack is that tracker: a self-hosted kanban board purpose-built for tracking tasks and bugs across one or more game projects, with real role-based permissions, per-project workflows, and zero monthly seat fees.

• $20 one-time cost
• $0 monthly subscription
• $0 seat fees
• $0 web hosting markup
• Unlimited projects, users, and tickets
• Self-hosted · PHP 8 / MySQL · no framework, no build step.

It's a real board, not a spreadsheet pretending to be one

Drag-and-drop task cards across as many columns as your workflow needs, with priority and type badges, group tags, and assignee visible at a glance — no click-through required to know what you're looking at.

Prefer rows to lanes? The same tasks are one click away as a sortable, filterable table — search by text, or filter by stage, assignee, or group.

Bug reports that actually carry the information a developer needs

Flip a task's type to Bug and three extra fields appear automatically: Expected behavior, Actual behavior, and Steps to reproduce. No more bug tickets that are just a title and a shrug.

Discussion and system history, never tangled together

Every task gets its own threaded comments tab — rendered through a light text-formatting engine with bold, italics, headings, lists, and color-highlighted code blocks — sitting right next to an automatically generated activity log. Mention another ticket's code, RFO-1 for instance, anywhere in a description or comment, and RefractTrack turns it into a live link automatically.

Approvals: a real sign-off step, not an honor system

Give playtesters and QA a stripped-down reporting form, and every ticket they file lands in a review queue before it ever touches the board — approve, mark won't do, or send it back, and every decision is reversible.

Bulk-create a whole biome's worth of tasks in one pass

Paste a list — enemy names, biome names, whatever repeats — write one title/description template with an {item} placeholder, and generate the whole batch at once. Save the list for next sprint if you'll need it again.

Stages and groups that bend to your project, not the other way around

Every project gets its own independent stages and groups — rename, reorder, hide, or add to them freely, and it never touches any other project. Hide a stage from the board without losing its tickets; delete one only once it's actually empty.

Permissions that go far deeper than "admin or not"

RefractTrack ships a genuine role-based permission system: 46 individual permission keys across tasks, comments, attachments, projects, stages, groups, saved lists, backups, themes, and user management — combinable into named role presets so setting up the next hire takes ten seconds, not ten menus. The sensitive permission set is checked per-project too: someone can hold a permission globally and still be denied for a specific project they lack access to.

Role presets are just a starting point, not a leash — apply one to copy its permissions onto a teammate, then adjust freely from there without ever touching the preset itself. Editing a role later never reaches back and changes anyone it was already applied to.

Two people, one ticket, zero lost work

When two teammates edit the same task at the same time, RefractTrack saves the changes field-by-field instead of letting whoever clicks second silently overwrite the first. Change different fields — or land on the same value anyway — and both saves apply cleanly.

Only a genuine collision, the same field changed to two different values, gets resolved in favor of whichever save landed first, and even then nothing is silently lost: what would have been overwritten is written to the task's activity log, with a plain-language note explaining exactly what happened. No schema change, no version/lock column, no blocking merge prompt — just a per-field comparison against what the form was originally loaded from.

Make it look like your studio's tool, not somebody else's

Fifteen accent-color themes (yes, including an animated Rainbow option) and a custom application name, both changeable in two clicks from inside the app — no file access, no redeploy. Every screenshot on this page, in fact, is shown in Ember, one of the fifteen.

Attach whatever the task actually needs

Screenshots, reference art, design docs, audio cues, a snippet of source — tasks accept a wide range of file types out of the box, grouped into images, archives, office documents, audio, plain text and data, source code, and a broad set of game-engine-specific formats (Godot, GameMaker, Ren'Py, and more). Installers, executables, and raw SVGs are never accepted, on every install, for safety.

Your data is never locked in

Back up an entire project — every ticket, comment, attachment, activity entry, plus its stages, groups, and saved bulk-create lists — as a single .zip file, any time you want, and bring it back into this instance or a different one. Task codes are renumbered cleanly on import and cross-references between tickets are rewritten automatically, so nothing breaks. A backup too large to upload through a browser can be restored straight from the server's command line instead, with no size ceiling to run into.

Nothing important is ever really gone

Archiving clears finished work off the board without deleting a single byte — everything stays searchable and can be restored in one click.

And it scales from a two-person prototype to a whole publishing slate

Run as many projects as you want from a single install, each with its own prefix, task numbering, stages, and groups — switch between them from the same nav bar without losing your place. RefractTrack remembers the project you were last on, so logging back in drops you right where you left off.

Why teams pick RefractTrack

• Multi-project, per-project config — one install covers your whole studio's slate, not just one game.
• No seat fees, no usage tiers — self-hosted on plain PHP and MySQL/MariaDB, one server, no per-user billing.
• Ready for playtesters — testers can file tickets without seeing anything else that's going on, and what they submit gets a sign-off step before it clutters the board.
• No framework tax — no build step, no bundler, no JavaScript framework to keep patched, just PHP pages designed to support your team.
• Bug reports with substance — expected/actual/steps-to-reproduce fields built into the task type itself, not bolted on as free text.
• Real role-based access control — not "admin vs. everyone else": 46 permission keys, role presets, and per-project access grants.
• Built for busy teams — concurrency guards make it so two people editing the same ticket at once never silently lose each other's work.
• Everything is reversible — archive instead of delete, "won't do" instead of losing a ticket, edit history preserved on comments.
• Your data is never locked in — a single zip backup carries every ticket, attachment, and comment, restorable here or on a fresh install, any time you want it.
• Attachments built in — images, documents, audio, and source code all accepted out of the box, with a safe, curated allow-list.
• Hardened by default — CSRF protection everywhere (including login and install), secure cookies, security headers, and gated attachment downloads.
• A real migration system — schema updates apply automatically and safely, whether from the browser or a deploy script, with no manual SQL required.
• Guided setup, painless upgrades — an optional script gets a bare server ready to go; upgrading later is a files-only copy that never touches your data.
• Color themes + custom app name — make it feel like it belongs to your studio, with your name and color preferences.
• Task codes that link themselves — mention RFO-12 anywhere in a description or comment and RefractTrack turns it into a live link automatically.

What you need to run it

RefractTrack is self-hosted: bring your own PHP 8 / MySQL (or MariaDB) server, or provision a fresh one with the included setup script. It runs comfortably on modest hardware — even something as small as a Raspberry Pi 3B+ running Raspberry Pi OS Lite — and installs through a guided, in-browser setup wizard. No command-line work is required for day-to-day setup.

Requirements:

• PHP 8.x with the mysqli/PDO, zip, and mbstring extensions
• MySQL or MariaDB
• Any Apache capable web host
• or use the included setup script for a bare Linux server to get running quickly

Full documentation, including a walkthrough of every feature on this page, lives on the RefractTrack wiki.

Track everything, lock in nothing, and keep it a tool your team actually wants to open.

Screenshots above are from seeded demo data for two fictional projects, Refract Odyssey and Frostbound Skies, shown in the Ember color theme.

© Pixel Refraction Studio