McDon: Are these any good for practicing design skills while learning "proper" engines and programming etc?
catpower1980: Which type of design? Level design or Game design? Anyway, both begins with good old pen & paper as it saves time and you can be more creative when off the computer.
For level design, Stencyl has some tiling and collision system, so you can practice some basic 2D platformer like: how would you do design a Super Meat Boy level?
For game design, RPG Maker is good as you have to think at a larger scale, balancing the stats of your charcheters and monsters (countering debuffs, leveling curve and so on....), the flow of the story and events, the geography of the world, etc...
That's pretty much exactly what I meant, thank you. I was referring to the more "subtle" parts of the game that can't be really determined fully on paper, such as stats balancing, difficulty, speed of gameplay etc that you've to get a "feel" for yourself.
McDon: Are these any good for practicing design skills while learning "proper" engines and programming etc?
Tallima: There's a lot of material here. Some are great for prototyping level design (like GameGuru). Some are good at giving you multiple layers and each layer you go, you get to learn more about game-making. But you can get to whichever layer you want to at your own pace (like GameGuru and RPG Maker). Some are programming-only (like AppGameKit) but the programming there is non-object-oriented BASIC. So that will help you learn about variables, functions, loops and whatnot, but not get very complicated as far as variable scope, object-oriented classes and functions or more specific data types.
All, in my opinion, are great for hobbyist or for someone just learning. Because they make the learning fun and they allow you to finish a project.
But if you're going to plan on getting serious into this stuff (like C++, DX library calls, engine building, etc), then you will need to progress beyond these. But these are a great launching point.
I was mainly going to use these for prototyping and design (as mentioned above), but the detail for each of the programs should be useful to determine which to use and get, thanks.