18 days, one Spanish Inquisition at Kuripa, hundreds of lines of code and three complete engine rewrites later, I'm finally at the point where I can just sit down and convert my ideas directly into AS 3.0. Not only that, but the game uses BitmapDatas exclusively, features a special effect I like to call "Magic Smoke," and it runs close to the goal of 25 FPS on almost any system. I'll be sure and include an option to disable Magic Smoke, just to make sure.

Other than MagicSmoke, the game uses simple BitmapDatas for everything and copyPixels() whenever possible. No lag accumulates due to Garbage Collection, collision detection is almost instantaneous, and I finally figured out how to kill those pesky #1010 warnings. (Here's a hint: if you're stepping through an array, and other parts of your program can modify that array, make sure the stuff you're grabbing from the array is not null before you try to do anything with it!)