Creating your own vidya game.

I've always been interested, and now that I have gobs of free time, I figured I'd give it a shot.
Anyone know a specific program that can get me started?

I'm planning to create something in the same vein as Cave Story/2D Platformers.

Try this: http://flixel.org/

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

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.

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.

If you've never made a game, I suggest you start small. Then you can build on that, otherwise you'll get overwhelmed with things to do and stuff to add to the game, that you won't finish our decide to cram just too much stuff into it.

Hah, I guess that's true and all.

I'm using FlashPunk, and now my character can move.