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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