Needless to say, winning that contest was quite a windfall for me. Naturally, the first thing I did (before even getting my check,) was to purchase Flash CS3.

Let me tell you, the transition is HARD. Mostly because all the examples are presented as friggin' classes that you can't really use for anything without building your own test case. I'm interested in doing OOP eventually, sure, but not while I'm still trying to learn all the new commands. Sheesh.

Fortunately, AS 3.0 still works as a scripting language, it's just that a lot of the old ways of doing things have been replaced with classes, and sometimes one simple thing, such as a movieclip, has been divided into numerous classes, so you need to understand each component class and how they fit together, before you can really use one.

So yeah, I'm still learning the individual building blocks, but with luck I should soon have enough knowlege to start work on a simple AS3 game.

You know those really fast games with all the crazy ammounts of geometric shapes flying around? Yeah. I'm pretty sure you can't do those in Flash 8. They leverage the new Shape class, and I'm pretty sure they don't even contain the underlying code for timelines at all. It really is a totally different beast.

Flashkit has been a tremendous help, so far. With any luck, I should know enough to start seriously working on a game in a couple of days. :)