Stay ahead of deliverable drift.
DriftWarden shows where work has shifted from your plan, so you can respond early and bring your team, partners, and stakeholders with you.
For game producers and production leads. Built by Shawn Ketcherside, 25 years in game production at BioWare/EA, Bethesda Game Studios Austin, and more.
For game producers and production leads. Built by Shawn Ketcherside, 25 years in game production at BioWare/EA, Bethesda Game Studios Austin, and more.
Your plan moved. Now what?
Game plans change, and they should. It’s creative work. But the change hides in meeting notes, Slack, email, and Jira. You can keep updating the work, but as change adds up, it gets harder and harder to see the impact.
Every week the plan and the work disagree, your team and partners spend effort on work that has already moved.
- Drift hides in the daily work of keeping things moving. By the time you can see it, you have the fewest options left, and what got done may not be what mattered.
- The next deliverable gets planned around what the team can do next, not what the game needs next. Things get done, but the game doesn’t get closer to shipping.
You can’t respond to change you can’t see. DriftWarden shows it to you early, so you can respond with intent instead of just reacting.
Check your plan in minutes.
Sweeps take minutes and run on the tools and notes your team already uses.
Lock the plan
Import the milestone plan you already have. DriftWarden flags holes and missing information, then you lock it as the baseline.
Sweep for drift
Pick your tools, like Slack or Jira, point to meeting notes or documents, or drop in email or text, and run a sweep whenever it suits you. It checks everything against the plan, and against each other.
Decide what changes
Each finding shows what moved and what it touches. You make the call, update the plan, and DriftWarden keeps the record.
Two districts. Art for three.
Tuesday’s design review cuts the hub from three districts to two. On Friday, your art partner confirms the next batch of district-three art is set to start on Monday. Jira still has district-three work in sprint 6, and the milestone plan still promises three districts. All while your eyes are on an upcoming demo.
DriftWarden lets you run a sweep across all those tools and surfaces the issue so you can solve it, preventing lost time and wasted work while your focus stays on the demo the team needs to deliver.
Batch 2 is redirected before Monday, and the team stays focused on the demo.
See a sweep like this one, run on a sample milestone.
Request a walkthroughPlan the next one knowing why.
When you plan Milestone 4, district three isn’t just a line that disappeared. You know it was cut at the design review, what it was traded for, and that the partner’s batch went to district one instead. So the next plan starts from the right question.
You walk into planning knowing what you pushed, why, what it touched, and what the next plan needs to account for. Share that record when you bring your publisher, execs, or partners into the next plan.
See the shift behind the requests.
For outsource and co-dev studios, change arrives as client requests: a tweak to a character, a new screen, a revised reference. Each is easy to approve on its own.
DriftWarden flags each request against the scope you committed to and keeps them side by side. When several start pulling the same way, you can see the change in direction and raise it with your client while the scope conversation is still open.
- See every client request next to the scope it touches.
- Bring your client a clear picture: what you committed to, what’s shifting, and what it means for scope and schedule.
Your team keeps its tools.
DriftWarden is designed to work with your tool stack, so nobody changes how they work.
Connect directly to tools like Slack or Jira, upload documents, meeting notes, transcripts, or spreadsheets, give it emails, or paste in text messages.
Import your plan from the docs, plans, or spreadsheets you already keep.
| Does well | Can’t show you | |
|---|---|---|
| Jira or your tracker | Tracks the work: what’s assigned, in progress, and done. | Why the plan changed, and what else that touches. |
| Your plan doc or spreadsheet | Holds the plan you locked. | Every change since, unless someone updates it by hand. |
| DriftWarden | Keeps the plan and the work side by side, with the reason for every change. | |
You stay in control.
You approve every change.
DriftWarden proposes findings. Nothing in your plan changes until you confirm it.
It watches the plan, not people.
Findings are designed around changes to the work and where they surfaced, not individual performance.
Set up around your AI policy.
We work with you to fit DriftWarden to your studio’s AI policy and your client or publisher constraints. Custom setups come with their own terms.
Built by a producer.
Shawn Ketcherside has spent 25 years in game production, engineering, and design, on Star Wars: The Old Republic, DOOM (2016) multiplayer, Super Lucky’s Tale, and Wordscapes. DriftWarden comes from years of keeping highly iterative, rapidly changing plans on track so projects ship. Designed for production, by production.
See a sweep, start to finish.
A 30-minute walkthrough with Shawn on a sample milestone, no confidential material needed.
- A plan locked as a baseline, and a sweep across sample notes, Slack, and Jira
- The findings it surfaces, and how one decision updates the plan
- How it would fit your studio’s tools and review cadence
Early-access studios get founder-led onboarding.
Request a walkthrough
Questions
How long does a sweep take?
Minutes. You pick the sources from the tools and notes your team already uses, and run it whenever it suits you.
Does it replace Jira or our planning docs?
No. Your team keeps its tools. DriftWarden reads across them and tracks how the work differs from the plan.
What does my team have to do?
Nothing new. They keep working in the tools they use now. You choose the sources and run the sweeps.
Does it change the plan on its own?
No. It proposes findings, and you confirm every change.
Can we use it on client or publisher projects?
Yes, and we set it up together first. Before any project material goes in, Shawn works with you to fit DriftWarden to your studio’s AI policy, your processes, and your client or publisher constraints: which sources go in, what gets redacted, and what stays out entirely.
What if our studio has strict rules on AI use?
We know how important that is. Shawn works with your studio, and your IT team where needed, to help DriftWarden fit your policies. Our AI provider, Anthropic, doesn’t train on your material by default, and we’re happy to walk your team through how your data is handled.
What does it cost?
Pricing is set per studio during early access, and we’ll talk it through after your walkthrough.