Thoughts on AS3

Last week, I worked through Kongregate.com's flash game tutorial and made my Urban Defense game in Actionscript 2. It took me a little bit of effort at first getting used to the "Stage", and the onEnterFrame() loop, but all in all I found it intuitive and easy to get going. It took me three days to make the game in the tutorial and add some significant enhancements to it.

Shortly after uploading it, I discovered another tutorial for the same game that used Actionscript 3. I decided to rebuild my game, in AS3. It turned out much more difficult than I'd expected and ended up taking more time than doing the original game had!

The first frustration was that AS3 is more verbose. Seriously, it reminded me of Java, and I am not impressed when someone finds a way to make a modern scripting language feel like Java. Even though I took greater advantage of inheritance than I had in my original game, the source code was 22k vs 17k in the AS2 version.

More importantly, AS3 makes doing a lot of things that I want to do a pain. For example, the code I wrote for handling wingmen power-ups in AS2 made use of being able to check what is on the stage via the _root variable.
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Initial Earnings from Kongregate.com

I've been inspired by Patrick's example, and have decided to share my thoughts and business results as I proceed with this endeavor. Here's the first earnings report:

I recently uploaded my first game to Kongregate, Urban Defense. It was based on the tutorials, and it was an extremely simple side-scrolling shooter game. There are under 5 minutes of game play. It wasn't just what was covered in the tutorials, though. I found some background music to add to it and also coded some wingmen that will join your main ship and help you fight against the alien invaders.

Since I released the game exclusively on Kongregate.com and I used the Kong API, they share half the ad revenue. My portion came out to $2 for the first day. Since the new games always get a bit more traffic, I suspect the lifetime earnings for this game will be under $10. That's not much, but considering I hadn't ever used flash before and I was able to build the game in 3 days, I don't feel too bad about it. In order to make this a self-sustaining enterprise, I figure I need to get about 14,000 plays a day. That would earn me about $20USD/day and cover my living expenses here in China.

I have two ideas for my next project:

1) Maybe I could do a slightly harder game such as a Tetris or Arkanoid clone.
2) Or, I could make further improvements to Urban Defense, such as a more weapons and levels.

I'm kind of on the fence. I might learn faster from making another game, but I could probably make a more enjoyable one by polishing the one I already have.