Take it from an rpg maker vet...It's fun to play around with if you've never touched programming of any type. However, it doesn't prepare you for real game design and it's very limited. If you want to start at a basic level below Game Maker, I would say look into Multimedia Fusion. I haven't used Clickteam's software since The Games Factory, but it will teach you basic concepts of variables and collisions and such.
