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[BeauPrime]

I've been using Game Maker for a while, and I agree: it is very flexible, quite powerful, and a good development tool to use.  Some people just brand it as a starter tool, or being a "kiddie" tool, but you can make some darn good games with it.  A good game is a good game, no matter what the tool behind it.  I'm in the middle of using it to finish an exploration platformer.  I do like how it is flexible enough, however, that I can make my own version of Powerpoint in it.  It's good for prototyping something quickly, as well; I recall seeing on Gamasutra a postmortem for a 2d Incredible Hulk game, where the levels were prototyped in Game Maker.

Of course, the drawbacks are there, though they don't really stand out as major flaws, just small limits you have to work within, just like with all systems.  The relatively minimal support for 3d functions is lamentable, but the tool isn't made for those functions.  Eventually, I'll have to start learning C++, but for now, I'll stick with Game Maker for my major projects.

[Luca Pavone]

I've made a few pretty nifty games in Game Maker, and I started when I was 13.
Although it's a useful little tool, I think that it relies a tadge too much on .dll support if you want to make something truly interesting rather than an a quickie arcade game, or something that uses the built-in save/restore functions.
I'll agree that it's also very good for greyboxing your ideas before throwing them into a language which is a bit more unforgiving.

However, I need to learn how to use things like UDK for my next project. Maybe I'll do a quick mockup in Game Maker first.

[___]

One of my only complaints about GM is the room editor and it's inability to handle a lot of tiles.  If I paint a bunch of tiles into a room, forget it.  Editing it becomes lag city, as scrolling one or two tiles will take like 10 seconds of thinking time.  I really like the structure of it though, and most of all the scripting.

Just wish they would take another pass at the room editor in general and make it more usable than just writing the instructions on the bottom left of the screen.

[Akari]

I'd have to say that Game Maker is probably the best 2D game development IDE out there.

I disagree - I'd say Construct takes that cake at ease, even though it's still not in version 1.0 and might be a bit unstable at times. The runtime is notably more efficient than Game Maker's, it's fully hardware-accelerated from bottom to top, the event system is fantastic, and can be extended to pretty much anything with Python (for example, I recently integrated SQLite into my Construct project using Python, and now my inventory works better and simpler than ever). It also has some limited 3D capabilities, but it's main purpose is 2D game development.

I would seriously suggest people to give it a spin, even if they've been using MMF/GM for years. I personally moved from MMF/MMF2 to Construct, and never looked back.

Another reason to give it a try is that it's completely free as well (and open source to boot)!

[Onza40]

I'm downloading construct now, will try and make a SHMUP in it and see how it goes, I'll leave feedback later today probably.

[bento_smile]

I would seriously suggest people to give it a spin, even if they've been using MMF/GM for years. I personally moved from MMF/MMF2 to Construct, and never looked back.

Seconded. Even MMF2's Flash runtime thing isn't enough to drag me away from Construct! 

(Although, there are a few things I wish they would add/fix/finish... I should probably stop being an obnoxious Construct fan at people.)

[Onza40]

Just cracked out construct, don't like it, could well be because I'm used to GM, but even when I started with GM, it was intuitive what was going on.
Sprite -> Object -> Room, repeat until you have something that does things resembling a game.
Construct seems overly complex in the basic interface so if I want to make 2d games, I'll stick with GM.
And for people starting out, GM is far better for simplicity, also the GM tutorials are a lot better done.
Just my opinion anyway.

[pgil]

Yeah, I also find Game Maker a lot more intuitive (Though I'll admit the underlying engine in Construct seems a lot nicer).