I've been using articy:draft for quite a long time now and I have to say... I love it. I've been using it since Steam V1 (if I recall rightly), and upgraded to V2, and now V3. However I mainly use it for documents over anything else and I'm only breaking the surface with Flow editing.
I do however have a small laundry-list of things I'd love to see go into it, or changed so that they're possible/easier in the future. I fully understand that it's harder than it looks to change/implement things, I'm not expecting anything, but... nudge-nudge wink-wink lads!
![Zwinkern ;)](./images/smilies/icon_e_wink.gif)
Alrighty, I said Strap In, so let's get busy:
1) Document Feature Upgrades -
I saw another post about this, and as I work a lot in documents and would love some of the things I saw in that other post.
That topic for reference is: http://www.nevigo.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=18102.
As for other things, I made a post on the Steam Discussions about the Spell Checker, which I'll repost here: http://steamcommunity.com/app/570090/discussions/0/135509314048194379/ - mainly that it feels a little slow and clunky, and could be improved with a custom dictionary feature, not just an ignore feature. As yours "feels" like Microsoft Word, but not as fast, which is why I do a lot of document writing in Word or One-Note before putting it into my documents in articy.
I have been told on the Steam Discussion (right now actually, while writing this) that it wasn't on the roadmap, but maybe further down the road! Currently I'm going to try the word count thing in the startup options when I get home and see if that helps any!
2) Tutorials -
The software is missing a lot of tutorials that could help people improve their knowledge, and get better at using it, and official ones wold be perfect to have up on the website and youtube. The big guide you have up on the main site is a great source of information, however a lot of people are more "learn by seeing and following" than reading. The official tutorials you have up there are now around 5 years old, and while the major functionality of the software remains the same, all the quality of life updates and extra features you've added over the years would be great in new tutorials.
Also, you could have a tutorial series that's specifically about designing certain things. Like in the features list for V3 you mention creating Skill Trees and Tech Trees - I've been having a nightmare of a time with that trying to find a "good" way of doing it, as there's no real tutorial for it on the site.
3) Downwards Flow -
The flow goes left to right for the most part, and while you can go down the arrows look a little funky. Would it be possible to have pins added to flow fragments that go on the top and bottom? As a lot of skill and tech trees in games go up/down. I know I could just do them left-to right and "imagine" them as going downwards, but this is more of a personal preference thing!
4) Trees -
I mentioned it in both points 2 and 3, but I've been having a whale of a time trying to find a decent way of doing talent and tech trees in a simple way, so I'm either missing something, or going wrong somewhere simple that my thick-skull is bashing against.
Would there be any way to get a dedicated section for creating different types of Trees? Right now I'm doing this to create a single "Talent" to make a World of Warcraft Style talent tree:
1) Design custome values as PROPERTY DEFINITIONS.
2) Design Talent Setup as a FEATURE using the PROPERTY DEFINITIONS and other standard ones.
3) Add the created FEATURE to a TEMPLATE.
4) Go to Flow and create a new FLOW FRAGMENT.
5) I assign that FLOW FRAGMENT the TEMPLATE.
6) Set them out in rows of three.
But even this doesn't really look so hot, and it's a pain to edit the information in each individual fragment as you have to go into their properties, which takes you to a brand new page. So if anyone knows a great way to do the Skill/Tech trees, please let me know!
5) Multiple Choice Property Definitions
When I'm designing a character class, they may use one type of Armor and so I can make a custom drop-down list for that and save it as a Definition, but if I want them to use multiple weapon types, I can't have something where I can select multiple options at once; like having a list of 10 different weapons and clicking 5 of them, which then adds them to the "can use X weapon types" box.
For this what I've had to do is just create a normal text box Custom Definition and put all the weapon types in there in a row, use that in each "new" class, then delete out the ones I don't want them to be able to use. I could just write the specific ones out each time, but I'd like to keep them in some order I can access and click quickly.
6) Steam Cloud -
I have an open topic on the Steam Discussions about this too: http://steamcommunity.com/app/570090/discussions/0/135509472108838804/ - it would be great if you could choose where saved projects were to be synced to the Cloud rather than having to use an external program to do it. Is there no way to make the program go "Well he's saved it in X location, so when I update cloud storage, I take from this location" instead of having to save them in a singular place?
If I have anything else then I'll add to this post in the future!
Cheers and have a good day,
Christopher / Tabriel