I listed some alternatives to Game Maker in two blog posts: "how to make video games without programming" and "more ways to make games without programming".

I think those most similar to Game Maker would be Construct 2, Multimedia Fusion, Stencyl and GameSalad. I'm a big fan of Construct 2 personally, but Game Maker is also very popular and quite capable. Try out the free or demo versions of a number of packages that interest you and choose whichever you personally prefer yourself.


The strengths of Game Maker -- and similar packages -- have been covered pretty well above, but I just wanted to point out that beyond prototyping and making games for your own private usage a skilled developer can actually use these packages to release a successful game. Legend of Fae and Serious Sam: The Random Encounter were made with Game Maker and are both distributed via Steam. Saira was made with multimedia fusion and is also distributed via Steam. To the Moon was made with RPG Maker that is privately distributed and was Metacritic's highest user-rated game of 2011.

Beyond simply prototyping, if you take the time to become proficient with the packages you can develop good quality games and make some money with them, and I think over time as they become more popular and more capable we'll see more examples of successful games made this way.