I grew up with Klik n Play (or however they spelled it) and The Games Factory. Both were pretty good tools for making 2D games: They had a fairly flexible event-driven engine with a bunch of prepackaged stuff for collisions and movement schemes, and you could make some decent games with it. It still had the problem that I didn't have any good ideas of what to do, but the examples they showed were neat.
It also had one really intuitive feature for programming the game: You could play through your incomplete game, and every time an event occurred that hadn't been programmed, it would pause the game and ask you what to do. So you could, for example, jump into spikes, then tell it that when you do that it should kill your character. Or you could shoot an enemy, and tell it that it should destroy the enemy and the bullets.
It also had one really intuitive feature for programming the game: You could play through your incomplete game, and every time an event occurred that hadn't been programmed, it would pause the game and ask you what to do. So you could, for example, jump into spikes, then tell it that when you do that it should kill your character. Or you could shoot an enemy, and tell it that it should destroy the enemy and the bullets.
