Anon,

Some notes about how attacks work. The Avatar and Enemy classes have a logic() routine. Enemy actually uses the BehaviorStandard::logic() routine; that one's cleaned up so maybe it's a good place to look.

When the player presses an attack button, or the enemy decides to attack, they switch to an attack state (which has an appropriate animation, like swing/shoot/cast). At a certain Active frame in the animation it calls PowerManager::activate(). If it is the kind of power that causes a Hazard, that's where it is created. Each frame, active hazards are compared to the list of enemies to check for hits. If you need a more detailed explanation of any part of that just let me know.

I'm not sure if Flare is a good place to learn. I want to think so -- many people from many different countries have worked on Flare, so it must be relatively easy to learn. It is definitely a very simple approach to a game engine. Most modern engines are far more complex, usually for good reasons though.