Thank you for all the replies!
Game maker is closest to what I was using before, I had written my own map editor and had a sort of event system going. GML is not confusing at all. I nabbed it when they were offering it for free a few months ago.
I looked around in Construct 2 and I can't see using it for anything other than quick mobile games. Oh well, I guess I'll have to wait for good scml implementation in other engines.
I'm downloading Unity at the moment. I remember reading someone on TIGS say they've used GM for the past 8 years and would recommend Unity to new game devs.
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I have an angel investor interested in funding my startup studio at the end of the summer and my potential programmer is graduating with Unity experience. Perhaps it would be best to learn that, then, even if game maker is the better personal choice. However because of these circumstances I am still working as a freelancer in most of my time, and if I want to concentrate on actual game development Game Maker seems to be the better option.
So thank you Indigo, I'll spend some time with GM and Unity tonight and see how easy it is to get a little guy moving around and interacting with objects. Likely I will go with GM for my actual development and experiment in Unity to make sure I know my way around it, but we'll see.
I have played around in Godot, which is apparently extremely similar to Unity, and I really liked it. It's still in beta so I'm not using it for anything real. Anyone into open source and 2d/3d game dev should check it out:
http://www.godotengine.org/