I still have not found a development platform that I enjoyed as much as Flash.

I'll admit that a large chunk of why I have such good memories is because it was one of the first programming platforms I learned, so there was a lot of novelty to it, but I still think it was a very fun platform.

It was so fun that it was "animation-first"; I would be dicking around drawing a shitty cartoon, and then decide I might want to add some code, so I convert to a movie clip and start scripting. I have played with a few game dev toolkits (and I'm even a maintainer for GDevelop on NixOS [1]), and they certainly can be fun, but I'm still chasing the high that I got from coding in Flash.

I actually think that, ironically, writing Flash games might be a valid path forward again. Ruffle has gotten quite good, and importantly the features are locked, so you could treat writing games in the same way that people do homebrew for the SNES or something.

Maybe if I can figure out how to get Flash CS6 working in Wine I'll give it a spin again.

[1] https://search.nixos.org/packages?channel=26.05&query=gdevel...