Getting around
People live in the left rail: add a name there and drag it onto the board. The board in the middle is the map itself; the buttons at the top left switch it between Diagram (plain nested boxes) and Building (the pixel office). YAML opens the same document as text on the right. Insights (top right) flags what a manager should notice, and the toolbar above the board holds groups, templates, undo, versions and display options.
Not fond of pixel art? Stay in Diagram and pick Initials under Display: plain boxes, no sprites anywhere.
Groups and shared spaces
Groups hold people. A group inside a group is a sub-group. A shared space (band) spans several groups: a QA pool, an on-call rotation, shared efforts.
Shares and FTE
Drop with Alt held to split a person between two groups. Every seat has a share bar: drag it (5% steps), or focus it and nudge with the arrows; click the NN% badge to type a value. The roster bar shows each person's total; Insights flags anyone over or under 100%.
FTE (full-time equivalent) adds the shares up: two people at 50% count as 1 FTE. The People header totals the whole roster; each group header counts its own people and FTE, sub-groups included.
The two views
Diagram is the nested-box chart. Building is the office: rooms on a grid, doors where linked rooms touch, corridors where they do not. Drag a room by its grip, resize from the corner.
Visit and Sim
Visit lets you walk the office with WASD or the arrows. Sim brings it to life: everyone walks in, works, fetches coffee in a shared space, chats, holds team syncs; a split person hops between desks. Click a character, then a colleague to make them talk or the floor to send them there. Both open the Building view on their own.
The clock dims people outside their 09:00 to 17:00 local: scrub it, jump to Peak (the fullest hour) or Play day to watch the office hand over from zone to zone; everyone takes lunch around noon local. Energy and company drift while people work and weight what they do next (hover a character to see them).
Stir the floor with a party, a coffee break, an earthquake, an outage (the responders are the room that owns it plus every shared space that spans it), a fire drill, a visitor tour (a guest walks every room and the people there greet them) or a demo day (everyone gathers in the biggest room, one person presents). Drop someone from the roster onto a room while the sim runs and they walk from where they landed to a desk. Nothing from the sim lands in the document.
Puzzle
Puzzle scrambles the map and asks you to put everyone back in the fewest moves: the board marks who moved and the Changes tab lists it; Hint flashes one wrong seat; Give up restores the map. Undo is off while it runs. Best scores stay in this browser per document title. Turn Sim on first and the people walk as you fix it.
Teams that work
Give people tags and groups needs; Insights flags a group missing a skill. Locations (or a time zone) feed a core-hours strip in the group sheet and an Insight when a team shares fewer than three hours. Templates start a squad, a pod, a platform team or a shared rotation in one click; CSV pastes straight in.
Display
Per document: center seats in their box, show shares as bars, badges only or hide them, let a cat or a dog keep an open seat, pixel sprites or initials, order seats by name or share, hide locations. Each person's avatar has presets (glasses, cap, headset, laptop, coffee, top hat, cat, dog, robot) and fields to customise; everything lands in the YAML.
Versions
Snapshot the document before a change (it is stored inside the YAML as history:, so it travels with links and exports). Scrub through snapshots, restore one, or compare now with a snapshot or a pasted document: the board marks who moved, joined, left, and whose share changed; the Changes tab lists it all.
YAML
YAML is the document. Edit it in the side panel and Apply (Cmd/Ctrl+Enter). Define profiles: once and extends: them from groups or people, gitlabform style. Share links carry the whole document.
Keys
- Enter / Space
- pick up the focused person; Enter on a group seats them (Alt+Enter splits)
- ← → on a share bar
- nudge the share by 5 (Shift for 10); Home/End jump
- Delete
- remove the focused seat from its group
- Esc
- drop what you carry, close panels, leave Visit mode
- Cmd/Ctrl+Z
- undo (40 steps, includes Clear and loading an example); Shift redoes
- W A S D / arrows
- walk, in Visit mode
- click, click
- in Sim mode: a character, then a colleague (they talk) or the floor (they walk there); Enter on a focused character does the same; Esc clears the pick
- ?
- this card
