Fifteen lineages, each with its own XP bonuses. Five evolution stages from Hatchling to Legendary, and 52 collectible hats, tools and colours.
Feed The Troll - Jira Cloud App
Your sprint board, as a 16-bit RPG
Everyone on the team gets a pixel troll. It gains XP from work that already happens in Jira: worklogs, status changes, blocker flags, comments, closed sprints, and Toasts sent between teammates. Sprint results feed a village the whole project shares. Go quiet for a week and nothing bad happens, because the streak pauses rather than resetting and sleeping is the lowest state there is.
Free for 2 projects, permanently. Nothing to book, no sales call, no card.
Runs on Atlassian
Forge SQL
No Write Scopes
Free for 2 projects
Twenty four seconds, recorded in a real Jira issue. A teammate sends a Toast, the troll eats it, and the level-up lands. That is the whole demo.
What It Is
Logging time in Jira is not hard. It is unrewarding. You type a number into a box, the box says nothing back, and every week the habit slips a little further down the list.
Feed The Troll adds the half that was missing. It watches eight things your team already does, worklogs, status transitions, blocker flags, comments, sprint completions, and Toasts sent and received, and turns each into XP for a small creature that visibly gets stronger because of it. No new workflow, no extra field, nothing anyone has to remember.
Buildings from Hut and Smithy up to Keep and Tower feed on team health. Closing a sprint triggers a raid whose outcome depends on the defence score the team built up.
Streaks pause instead of resetting. No sick state, no dying state, no losing a level, no XP ever taken away.
A Forge app with no remote backend and no external database. Even a Jira System Admin cannot see another person's private troll data.
How It Works
Work Earns XP
Eight activities feed the troll, and the good habits are worth more. Logging time on the same day you did the work is worth 1.5 times the base. Moving an issue to Done is worth double. Closing something that has been sitting in the backlog for over a month, a Dusty Ticket, is worth two and a half times.
| Activity | Base XP | Best case |
|---|---|---|
| Log time on an issue | 15 | 22 XP, logged the same day |
| Transition an issue | 10 | 25 XP, a Dusty Ticket moved to Done |
| Flag an issue as blocked | 20 | 40 XP, flagged with an explaining comment |
| Comment on an issue | 8 | 12 XP, on somebody else's issue |
| Sprint completed | 50 | 100 XP, at 90 percent or better |
| Receive a Toast | 10 | Plus 5 XP to whoever sent it |
Your lineage adds a further bonus on top. A Chrono-Troll gets 30 percent more for worklogs, a Scrum Centaur 50 percent more for closed sprints, a QA Chimera 30 percent more for comments. You can switch lineage once a month without resetting your level.
It lives in the issue panel, beside the work. TicketEater is a Hatchling on the Streak Salamander lineage, 10 XP into the 141 needed for level 2, with Worklog Warrior ready to start and the later quests gated behind levels.
The Village Reacts To The Team
Each project has a village of buildings, a defence score and a prosperity score. Aging issues and work-in-progress overload pull defence down. Flagging blockers pulls it up, because flagging is communication. Complete a sprint and a raid fires automatically, scored against whatever defence the team had built.
| Raid outcome | Defence | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Victory | 60 or above | A building upgrade unlocks and every troll earns 55 to 75 bonus XP |
| Stalemate | 40 to 59 | The village holds. No bonus, no change |
| Damage | Under 40 | The highest building drops one level. Cosmetic, and no troll is harmed |
A Team Village combining four projects into one home, defence at 96 and prosperity at 100, with every building maxed. Each project also has its own Troll Village, and that one is included in the free tier.
Toasts Between Teammates
Send someone a Toast and something happens: their troll eats, worth 10 XP to them and 5 to you, with an optional short message attached. Recognition stops being an emoji that scrolls out of sight by lunchtime. Anyone who would rather not receive them can switch them off.
A Toast arrives as a chest with the sender and the issue attached, so the thanks stays connected to the thing it was for.
Why It Stays Healthy
Gamification at work usually dies the same way. A number appears that people can lose, so they start protecting the number, and protecting a worklog number means logging work that did not happen. Three mechanics exist specifically to stop that.
Streaks Pause, They Never Reset
A streak counts consecutive days with any Jira activity. Miss a day, a weekend or a fortnight in Portugal and it simply holds where it is. After three quiet days the troll falls asleep, which is the lowest state that exists, and any activity wakes it up exactly where it was.
| State | Condition | Next |
|---|---|---|
| Sleeping | Three or more days since any activity | Any activity wakes it |
| Awake | Active today, streak under three days | Three days running, it starts thriving |
| Thriving | Active, streak of three days or more | A level-up starts a celebration |
| Celebrating | Roughly thirty seconds after a level-up | Back to thriving or awake |
There is no sick, sad or dying state. Levels never go down, XP is never taken away, and the only downward transition in the whole app is falling asleep.
Daily Caps Make Grinding Pointless
Every activity has a cap and a cooldown. Four worklogs a day, one an hour. Eight transitions. Three blocker flags. Once you hit a cap, XP quietly stops until the next day, with no error and no telling-off. Splitting one piece of work into six worklogs earns you nothing extra, so there is no reason to do it.
The Bonuses Reward Doing It Properly
The multipliers all point the same way: log time the day you did the work, flag a blocker and explain it in a comment, comment on someone else's issue rather than your own, close the ticket that has been rotting in the backlog since spring. The fastest route to XP happens to be the behaviour a team lead would ask for anyway.
The One Thing That Can Go Backwards
Honesty about the exception: after a sprint closed with a defence score under 40, the village's highest building loses a level. It is cosmetic, it is shared by the whole project rather than pinned on anyone, and it rebuilds. No troll is ever harmed by it, and no individual loses anything.
What Your Team Sees
The defaults are deliberately split. Your troll and your level show, because an empty village is no fun and a level is a costume rather than a performance figure. The two numbers colleagues would actually rank each other by, your streak and your total XP, start switched off.
| Setting | Default | Controls |
|---|---|---|
| Show my troll in village | ON | Your troll appears in the village scene |
| Show my level to team | ON | Your level on the leaderboard |
| Show my streak to team | OFF | Your consecutive active-day count |
| Show my XP details to team | OFF | Your total accumulated XP |
| Allow kudos from teammates | ON | Whether others can send you a Toast |
There is a leaderboard, and it is on by default. It ranks by level and nothing else, and it only ever shows what each person has left visible, so anyone who turns their level off disappears from it. Detailed XP and streak figures are not on it at all.
If competition is not for your team, an admin can switch on Global Harmony Mode. Leaderboards disappear across every project, kudos are turned off instance-wide, and what remains is village health, team quests and raid outcomes: cooperative only, with no per-project override.
The switches belong to the person. They sit in each user's own issue panel, and troll data is stored with per-user isolation, so a Jira System Administrator sees aggregate statistics only. Nobody, including the admin, can open up another person's private troll data.
For Your Jira Admin
The questions that decide whether an app gets approved, answered before anyone has to ask. Full detail is in the Trust Center and the Privacy and Security Policy.
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Where does it run? | Entirely on Atlassian Forge. No remote backend, no external production database, no outbound calls at runtime. |
| Where is data stored? | Forge SQL, in the same AWS region as your Jira instance, scoped to your tenancy. |
| Can it change our Jira? | No. Six read or storage scopes and zero write scopes. It cannot touch issues, comments, fields, worklogs, workflows or project settings. |
| What does it read? | Account IDs, project IDs, event types, timestamps, issue keys and sprint completion percentage. Never issue titles, descriptions, comment text, attachments, display names or email addresses. |
| Third-party analytics? | None in the app runtime. Eight one-time activation counters run through Atlassian's own metrics service and carry no account or issue data. An admin can disable them without affecting the product. |
| Rollout control | Enable it everywhere, pick specific projects for a pilot, or switch it off entirely. Switching off deletes nothing and turning it back on restores everything. |
| On uninstall | Forge deletes all app data automatically. Nothing remains on infrastructure the developer controls. |
| Support | Initial response target of one business day. Critical security reports triaged within 24 hours. |
Working with external customers on the same issues? By default the troll is visible to anyone who can view an issue, portal customers included. Turn on Restrict trolls to your team and it shows only to people holding Jira's View Development Tools permission. That covers the issue panel, the Troll Village and the Team Village. It is off by default, so existing setups are untouched.
Pricing
The free tier is not a trial. Two projects stay free permanently with the whole game switched on, and nothing expires or downgrades.
Free
Up to 2 Jira projects • forever
- All 15 lineages, 5 evolution stages and 52 collectible items
- Personal, team and seasonal quests, Tavern loot drops, Toasts and the leaderboard
- A Troll Village per project with buildings, defence and prosperity scores, and sprint raids
- No expiry, no credit card, nothing to book
An Atlassian Marketplace subscription, free trial included, lifts the two-project limit, unlocks enabling the app across all Jira projects at once, and adds Team Villages: several projects combined into one shared village with a single Traveling Troll per teammate. Billing runs through Atlassian like any other app.
Questions
Won't people just log fake work to farm XP?
Every activity has a daily cap and a cooldown. Four worklogs a day at one an hour, eight transitions, three blocker flags, and once a cap is reached XP stops silently until tomorrow. Chopping one task into six worklogs earns nothing at all.
The multipliers push the other way too. The highest-value actions are logging time the same day, explaining a blocker in a comment, and closing a ticket that has been stale for a month.
Will this turn into a surveillance dashboard?
Streak and total XP, the two figures anyone would rank people by, are off by default, and every visibility switch lives with the individual rather than an admin. Troll data is stored with per-user isolation, so a System Administrator sees aggregate numbers only and cannot open another person's data.
There is a leaderboard by level, on by default. Turning your level off removes you from it, and Global Harmony Mode removes it for everyone at once.
What happens if someone goes on holiday?
Nothing. The streak pauses rather than resetting, and after three quiet days the troll sleeps. Any Jira activity wakes it exactly where it was, with the same level, the same XP and the same streak.
Does it change our Jira configuration?
It holds no write scopes at all, so it cannot create or edit issues, comments, fields, worklogs, workflows or project settings. It reads events and draws its own panels. Uninstalling removes it cleanly, and switching it off from the admin page deletes nothing.
Where does our data go?
Into Forge SQL inside Atlassian's infrastructure, in your own region, scoped to your tenancy. No server belongs to the developer anywhere in the picture and no third-party analytics runs in the app. Every scope and table is listed in the Trust Center.
Can I try it without talking to anyone?
That is the whole idea. Ask your admin to install it, hatch a troll on one project, and you will know within a sprint. Nothing to book, no onboarding call, no email sequence waiting for you.
Who builds this?
One person, Kārlis Rozenbergs, in Latvia, trading as drinkits DEV. Report a bug and you are talking to whoever wrote the code, which is either reassuring or alarming depending on your history with enterprise software.