Novashell (http://www.rtsoft.com/novashell) (cross platform)

Ray Game Designer 2 is another good one. The only problem is that it hasn't been updated in forever, and unless you speak french, you won't get much help with it.

Does http://processing.org/ count?

I guess "rapid" is in the eye of the beholder ;-)

Can't believe I forgot about MegaZeux.

Microsoft just released an Alpha of a clipart-tastic browser-based Popfly. The clipart is ENORMOUS and the user-created games are atrocious. Trying to edit the graphics crashed my browser.

Just FYI, Gary Kitchen's Game Maker is available for more platforms than just the C64. I know an Apple II version was released, and I've heard mentions of it being available for DOS, Amiga and Atari ST.

Just discovered Game Editor, which looks vaguely interesting / nauseating. It's interesting in that it's got a Klik & Play-style map editor, and can build games for Windows, Linux, and a bunch of mobile platforms. There's certainly no shortage of trainwrecks being offered up by the community.

It's nauseating in that it uses C as its scripting language. Apparently if you don't pay for a license, your game is automatically GPLv3, so I'm guessing it bundles gcc and generates a bunch of C code.

Now, I could imagine a scenario where using C as a user-facing scripting language might not be an awful idea. For example, if you had the philosophy of building useful abstractions to minimize the opportunity for the user to shoot themselves in the foot. Instead, the philosophy seems to be that the user should write a bunch of repetitive code until their game works. They actually advocate cut-and-pasting giant functions full of nested switch statements which contain the entire logic of how the player moves just so that your character can wear different costumes!

It's apparently the choice of sixty-year-old women, though.

Scratch owns and is great for making trainwrecks, except for that you have to upload and play your creations to their buggy website.
Luckily I found a tool on the forums that will convert them to EXE's, for unawful distribution.
http://chirp.scratchr.org/dl/ChirpCompiler-setup.exe
Works with any version of scratch, and the projects I tested it with work fine. Might be handy to add it next to the Scratch link up there.

If you want to make a Pinball, VISUAL PINBALL is the way to go. Scriptable in Visual Basic.

http://www.vpforums.org/index.php?showtopic=4561

Apparently there is a new version called FUTURE PINBALL, too:

http://www.futurepinball.com/

Game Maker should be added. That's a name for another entirely different one for DOS, by RSD. Its existence is responsible for many DOS platformer trainwrecks (much like the other Game Maker is for Win32 platformer trainwrecks!)

I think the company for it totally folded, but there's a free-ish version out there. It's apparently hard to find when the other one of the same name completely buries this one.

If you know what "New Age Warrior" and "DIE BLARNEY!" is like, then this is what made that.

can you make some kind of * or footnote highlighting games that you DONT have to know some weird programming language for

for the simple folk

(me)

I didn't read through all the comments here, so this may have already been mentioned.

Clickteam has a free version of The Games Factory here: http://www.newgrounds.com/wiki/creator-resources/game-dev-resources/the-games-factory-2

What's the catch? Well, apparently it only exports .swf files that can be played on Newgrounds. So, you'll have to have a Newgrounds account and upload your creations there. Clickteam gets paid for those ads. (If you need to test an .swf, but don't want to formally submit the game to Newgrounds, simply upload it in the "Dumping Grounds" section in your account.)

I thought this would be interesting to those folks who are familiar with Klik stuff, but don't have the flash exporter.

I haven't actually used the software yet, but as far as I know, that's the only difference between this and the retail version of TGF2. I'll install it on Virtualbox later and check it out.

Flowlab game maker is a browser based game creator that lets you create complete games from scratch, in your browser. It uses a visual logic builder to create the game logic, so no programming is required, and games can be played on the web or exported to iOS.

Here's another site that seems to have a good database of game making things: http://creatools.gameclassification.com/EN/creatools/index.html

I also keep a bit of a list going here: http://wiki.selectbutton.net/software:titlescreen I should mention my wiki I guess :3 https://www.gamemaking.tools/wiki/

Thank you, very good tools