If you’re thinking of transitioning from Flash to Unity 3D, you’re in luck: the two programs are very similar, and it shouldn’t take you very long to feel right at home. The biggest difference that i can see between the two is that Unity is a proper game engine, while Flash is a program that you bully, beg and cajole into doing game-like things. Want collisions, 3D depth-swapping, particle systems, physics, shaders, and a whole lot more right out of the box (instead of implementing Box 2D, Away 3D, Collision Detection Kit, and God knows what else)? Unity is a real treat!
Here are a few glossary terms that kinda sorta carry over from Flash to Unity:
MovieClip == GameObject (but more accurately, Symbol == Prefab. Much like a MovieClip/Graphic/Button in Flash, whatever changes you make to a Prefab in Unity will replicate to all instances of that Prefab)
Scene == Scene (but Scenes in Flash are generally useless and glitchy … Scenes in Unity are the bee’s knees)
Unity.
Library == Project panel
Flash.
Unity.
Properties panel == Inspector panel
Flash.
Unity.
Timeline == A-NOTHING!! (except that there IS a timeline that allows you to animate GameObjects. The resulting animation is stored in an .anim file inside your Project panel. You can apply an animation to any GameObject in your Scene, so animations are curiously reusable)
Flash.
Unity. (warning: the UX [user experience] on this thing kind of blows ass.)
Instance names == tags … sorta (but unlike in Flash, you can have multiple GameObject instances with the same tag)
Flash.
Unity.
Layers == layers (but Unity does not display its layers in anything nearly as nice as the Flash timeline)
