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No. 1778132
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>>1777755
I am wonderful and talented now just for pointing you here? :3
>I am an aspiring game programmer, and right now I'm wondering whether or not using "Game Maker" will hurt me in the long run.
First, I'm generally very skeptical about the idea of technical solutions being "harmful in the long run" or "teaching students bad habits" or things like that (and Dijkstra be damned). There will be projects that are more or less educational than other projects, sure. That does not mean the less-educational ones will corrupt you.
Game Maker and similar systems (there are others) are designed to allow you to create a game with as little programming as the Game Maker guys can manage. Specifically, you're supposed to click together descriptions of what your game actions should do and how the game works, and little more than that. (That's still a considerable amount, though.) As a consequence, there are limits on what you can do with it, and much sharper limits on what you can do with it efficiently. (In-between is the awful place where you are using the wrong tool for the job and you would be much better suited to do it properly using better tools, but switching technologies in the middle of a project is too much of a pain so you'll keep using it until you're finally done with the project. Not a nice position to be in, and we've all been there.)
With Game Maker, you can create a game without understanding how games work at a deeper level than gameplay concepts. A Game Maker project starts with an empty game to which you then add gameplay concepts and graphics and sounds and things like that. You don't get to see first-hand how a game consists of parts that are not themselves games, the way a table consists of simpler components like pieces of wood and nails.
Whether or not using Game Maker is a good idea depends on what you want to achieve. If your primary goal is to create a simple game (here "simple" means "something that would not have been out of place in 1990 technologically", think Super Mario) and programming is just the way you need to do it, then go for it. If you are mostly trying to learn programming (or software development in general, which is a bit broader) and a game seems like an excellent project to develop your skills (which it is), using a general purpose programming system will suit you much better. It will, however, be a considerably more involved project! Constructing a game from first principles like "turn this screen pixel red" is a lot of work.
There are systems that are more or less intermediate between those two alternatives; systems like Flash that are designed for creating interactive multimedia applications in a pretty general sense. They are more general, powerful and educational than Game Maker but less than general-purpose programming languages, with a fostered understanding to match. I don't have much experience with systems like that though, so I'll leave it to someone else to comment on that.
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