Creating your own vidya game.

Try this: http://flixel.org/

It gives you everything you need and some tutorials. Good luck!

I played some of the demo games they have and they're SO SMOOTH compared to most flash games you see, but I'm not sure if that can build a gigantic 5-10 hour action plaformer with a storyline and everything.

Game Maker could be worth a look, if you don't program a lot yourself. You can do everything without programming, or could inject some programming code wherever you want to. There's tons of examples as well, and a lot of the experience can be used in the future if you're going to learn programming/CS later on.

Studying programming in college this fall but no, I don't have much programming experience at the moment.

Someone recommended me MMF2 but I gave up trying to find a super !FREE! copy of it.