thinking about how at the start of my career i learned Unity, and i made some pretty nice games with it, and then i decided, somewhat quixotically, to learn Flash and make some games in that. i did some stuff in Flash-the-editor, but especially back then i was a coder & not a person who makes vectors, so i never felt especially comfy in it. and then i found Flashpunk & the other AS3 game engines. and i remember the feelings i felt as i tried to get my head around this way of working.
i think my initial impression was: where's the game, when it's not running? there's just this code. i want to look at the objects in the game. i mean, i get where the objects come from, i can see the code for them. but it feels like there's a thing missing. how do i See It?
(this initial impression i actually still have a lot of time for. even if the Unity editor is bad at many of the tasks of actually... editing the game, i do still like being able to see the thing while i am making changes to it, and in a form that closely approximates what it looks like when it's running. something to think about!!)
and then: okay, so how does this work? and then used my IDEs thing where you click on a function and then you see what that function is. and then... i poked around and looked at the source, and honestly read most of it there and then. there wasn't much there! it was all just... here's some definitions, here's some ways of organising stuff. and if i had a different take on it, i could just... edit it.
and i should say here that i know the Flash runtime was doing a lot of heavy lifting here, dealing with all the messy difficult stuff about graphics contexts and loading files and turning AS3 code into something that could talk to other things.
but at the same time. it was exciting, and it made it very possible to imagine writing something similar. and no doubt, as Flash continued to wane, a similar kind of feeling motivated the people behind Haxe and the halo of similar projects, as they made something (many somethings) that did all of those difficult things that the Flash runtime did, initially with great compatibility with the Flash runtime and then increasingly just doing useful things in even more places.
and the whole time i was learning Flash, i was doing it against a backdrop of people worrying about the current decline of Flash, the knowledge that it was probably a dying platform and that Unity was probably the better choice to be learning for the long term longevity of my career. it was good to learn Flash & i made some fun stuff with it, and learned some useful stuff that transferred over to other projects and other environments. but probably the most useful thing i learned was that one day Unity would also die, and that it was worth spending some time with a variety of other technologies in advance of that happening.
