What programming a game in 48 hours taught me about programming

I participated in Ludum Dare 27 this weekend, programming a complete game, Spacetime Adventure, in 48 hours. I make games for a living but I’d never done that before. It was fun.

It was also enlightening. For the past several years I’ve spent most of my development time with C++11 in Xcode. I like it. Nah, I love it. But this weekend, working in Adobe Flash Professional with ActionScript 3.0, I could not believe how high my productivity was. I was knocking off tasks like they were popcorns in a fire. It helps that I used to work in Flash a lot, so I knew the drill. But I had forgotten how easy and quick it is to make games in that system.