I decided to check out a development environment (ostensibly for kids, but works for me) called Scratch. It was developed at MIT, but it is as friendly a user experience as Game Maker. It has the familiar logical blocks instead of code, and it is almost immediately accessible.

This is the product of about an hour's worth of work as a first project, from scratch. This is certainly not a testament to how fast I work, because I am generally slow, slow, slow. If you have a kid, I would definitely recommend you install Scratch for them. If you are interested in making games and interactive toys/tools, but are intimidated by coding, I would strongly recommend you check out Scratch for yourself. This is my favorite toy of 2009.