Am I insane to start learning AS3 and Animate for game development in 2019?

[MakorenDev]

My only exposure to the Flash web games era was Kongregate and similar sites, I didn't pick up games programming until a couple years ago. I've only used Flash once or twice in the past.

However, I recently picked up Adobe Animate and fell in love. I want to continue using it to animate, possibly use it to make games, and also explore the AS3 ecosystem outside of Animate (Flixel, FlashPunk, Starling, etc).

The problem is AS3's current state in 2019. Flash is nearing EOL, and AIR is being moved to another company where it will not be completely free. Not only that, but Haxe exists and seems to do AIR's job better while keeping a familiar syntax. Haxe also has its own version of some AS3 libraries like HaxeFlixel.

Is there anything AS3 does better than its competition? Should I follow my heart and learn AS3, or bite the bullet and learn Haxe instead?

EDIT: Should mention this is for solo dev, not for employed work.

[mark@headTrix]

HI,

I have not heard of all the apps you mentioned. But I used to create games and interactive marketing, eLearning, multimedia, etc. and I programmed using AS3. The good part about learning AS3 (if you like programming) is that it is an Object Oriented Programming language just like most of the big languages, which means learning AS3 is essential similar to learning other object oriented programming languages, so in your learning about click tags, and using variables, creating functions, if/then statements, arrays, loops, concatenating, etc. Will all rollover to any programming language.

But since you mentioned WEB games, you might want to think about where your games would play. And why not think big, will you be creating games to be played within a browser? Or games that are downloaded as apps? If for the browser you may want to use a canvas file and learn Javascript (similar to as3) but for export to HTML not a swf which will be deprecated. For apps I think programmers are using Python, Java, C++, and I think also Javascript! Not sure what is the most popular now.... but that also might be a good direction to go. I know you said its for you, but if you love it, why not get paid to do it!

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
mark