I've been playing around with the trial version of articy:draft v2.3.7 for the last few days and I'm very impressed. It almost exactly matches my thought processes and workflow. In fact, if the costs were lower, I'd have purchased it already. I can understand the current price point though, and think it's fair for the overall functionality of the product; however, the price point also changes my tolerance level for potential deal breakers which puts me on the fence about whether to purchase or not. I am a rank amateur when it comes to game design, not even indie level. More like power hobbyist, so the $200 price point (I'd likely get the Steam SE version and the upgrade for v. 2+) changes my expectations
The first potential deal breaker is the current implementation of flow logic, which is pretty much useless without a separate runtime or the really expensive (for me) middleware. Unfortunately, it's the most important consideration for me in the thought process to make a purchase. My project contains heavily branching and merging dialogue that constantly refers back to past player choices. Theoretically I can set conditions and variables in the flow, but they seem to have no effect whatsoever in the journey/playback other than cosmetic. I can't even see what variables are in effect, set, whatever during playback. Even the free (for me) Chat Mapper can handle flow logic in dialogue...I hate, HATE, HATESSESS chat mapper...but I have to use it currently because I've found no suitable alternative for actually modeling flow logic.
Doing some research I saw a developer diary from March showing potential flow logic modeling capability coming in v2.4...but that was March, plus a post somewhere saying 2.4 was coming "soon" in June or July of this year, so it's rapidly being classified as vaporware in my mind. Hopefully I'm wrong on that. Of course, no way I'm dropping a lot of money on articy:draft without trying out the feature if/when it does release, but I may be out of luck unless by some miracle the new version drops in the next 8 days left of my trial. Maybe when/if it does drop I can beg/borrow/steal a new trial to take it out for a spin. I really, really need that functionality so that I can ditch Chat Mapper. (Did I mention I hate it?) Lack of it is the de facto, number one total deal breaker for me.
This leads to the second potential deal breaker, and please take this as constructive criticism. Total lack of communication. What's going on? Is the company still in business? Is there only one guy left hiding under the desk in a dark office trying to hammer out just one more update before the company folds? Is the company healthy and growing? If I wasn't nearly desperate for a program like articy:draft, I would have taken one look at the recent communication levels and engagement on the forums and left. Almost all of the information is over a year old, and a lot of it from as far back as 2011. I almost expected to see a link to your "new site on GeoCities!" I wonder how many potential customers have wandered away thinking you folks have closed up shop, or are just about to. Again, if I could buy articy:draft for $50 or so, no problem. For $200+ software...I expect to see more pro-active communication and updates with the customer. I think this software has so much potential that it saddens me to see stale forums, news feeds, developer diaries, etc...
Not quite a dealbreaker, but a pile-on to the above. I'd love to be able to export/import flow (and only flow) to Visio, or equivalent. Probably the .SVD format. Maybe translating flow fragments and dialogues to containers, and everything else to sensible shapes, i.e. conditions to diamonds, Dialoge fragmets as standard squares, etc... I know implementation is probably a lot harder than it sounds, but some kind of basic functionality would be awesome! Maybe I'll pop over to the feature request section and drop a note there on this.
So here's the challenge to you folks. You're mission, should you choose to accept it. Convince me to purchase articy:draft, taking the above into account. Is the value truly there? Is 2.4 actually coming? Will the company be around in 2 years and/or still supporting the articy:draft software?