I've made a couple flash games, ported one to mobile, and had a job making games in Unity so I have some experience here.  Never used game maker myself, but it seems like a good tool for beginners.  I actually got started with RPG Maker, which has an event system that taught me the basics of logic and conditional branches that forms the core of programming, and from there went on to edit it's existing scripts here and there and then finally coded a flash game from scratch after years of that.  RPG Maker's a bit dated now I think so I'm not necessarily recommending it, just saying how I played around making stuff with it for years before actually seriously programming.

Used a bit of Unity at my old job for around 6 months or so, doing both 3D and 2D stuff, and it's a pretty great tool but I wasn't a fan of the 2D side of it.  Coming from flash game programming, it just felt like so much extra overhead to make 2D work with it since Unity essentially a 3D engine, plus it's 2D is still a fairly new and not quite as fleshed out as it's 3D features.

Currently I'm using HaxeFlixel for its great cross-platform capabilities.  You write code in Haxe (very similar to AS3) and you're able to compile it to desktop PC or Mac, a flash game, android, iOS, and a couple others.  Most of the targets converts the Haxe code into native C++ code when you compile if I understand it correctly, so performance is supposed to be better than if it's wrapped in some sort of package.

I'd recommend a tool like Game Maker if you're totally new to making games, but if you wanted to try code from scratch, HaxeFlixel isn't too hard to get started with.  It has a lot of it's own framework that I think most people use, but I ended up preferring to use Flash's own classes and display tree that I was familiar with which works totally fine.

Also regarding programming practices, I've found that basically every programmer has their way to write syntax that they think is "right," so just go with what you personally like.  For example I like to use inline ternary operators inline for simple booleans and do stuff like if (gamePaused) return true; on one line where some programmers would go nuts at that and say the only "correct" way would be to have 4 lines of if (gamePaused)
{
    return true;
}
I think the convention of prefixing variables with types like "flMyFloat" may be left over from early programming when compilers and editors weren't as robust and it'd be harder to find errors, so I think it's a bit overkill myself, but if you like to use it go for it.  A lot of tiny stuff like that's just a matter of opinion so just go with what you like.

I had a go at animating a small area:



Water's hard to animate.    The number of colors for the water floor seemed like too many so I reduced that.  I didn't add any light reflections on the top of the water to match the wavyness, which I think would be a further improvement.

Overall it looks pretty choppy; here's some notes as I looked at it frame by frame that I think may be causing that:

The head typically never moves left or right in a running animation, so that may be an issue here, and also the vertical movement isn't the same for each leg movement.  The first 6 frames seem ok on this point as the head is moving smoothly, but afterward it seems random where the top of the head is and doesn't match how high it was off the ground for the other leg.  I guess I'm talking more about the total height of the character, rather than just the head itself.

There's also a lot of body shifting left and right it seems.  The torso rotation is ok but his center of gravity is shifting around too much, and should be relatively stable horizontally.

Also you may want to add some more contrast between the (viewer's) front leg and back leg?  They can kind of do the optical illusion of switching which one's overlapping the other which doesn't sync up with the correct arm in front.

Lastly for a run, both feet are typically off the ground at their farthest point across, with the front leg's knee bent only slightly, but in these frames your pose isn't as strong as it needs to be making the animation kind of look like an intense power walk instead of a run.

Here are some pieces for an RPG I'm working on, The Enchanted Cave 2.  Any comments and criticism are welcome since I have a lot of art to do in the game and am just looking to improve as much as I can early on so I won't have to do over too many old ugly pieces.




Straw Hat, Butter Knife, Kitchen Knife
Cloth Shirt, Cloth Tunic, Leather Vest


A WIP of the inventory in-game to see how the item icons are used

Your background looks amazing.

For your 4-frame walk animation what stands out to me is when he sets his left foot down, his entire body is lower than when his right foot is down (I'm watching the top of the head).  For a side angle, these heights should be the same, otherwise it kind of looks like he is limping on an injured left leg.