Perhaps the most famous tool of this kind is GameMaker Studio, which has a free version, and the creators provide a marketplace for games too. That's the one I took for a test drive and can vouch for, but others exist, such as Construct 2. Another option would be to use a general-purpose visual programming language such as Scratch. (There are several of those, too.) But my advice is to buckle down and learn the basics of programming. The difficulty is not where you think!

Either way, I'd like to know which tool you chose (and what you made with it). Good luck!

Yeah, follow claudeb's advice. And to emphasize that learning how to program isn't hard,I learned how to in 6th grade. Once you lead to program, I can suggest other tools such as Unity*.

*Does not currently have builtin 2D support, but it WILL be in the next update.

If you are serious about making games, then learning how to program is ineviatable.

Here is my favorite "game making" application, a C/C++ IDE, open source, "free", and cross platform.
http://www.codeblocks.org/ 

I also use SDL, which is awesome for making cross platform games, also open source and "free".
http://www.libsdl.org/ 

I can vouch for Scirra Construct.  It is a brilliant game engine, and it's fairly cheap, too.

However, Paul Wortmann is correct.  You need to learn a programming language in order to really have the power to make whatever game you want to make.  If you want to jump right into the hard stuff and get some real programming experience, you should look at CodeBlocks and C++ and SDL2.  SDL is great as a graphics library for C++.  CodeBlocks is an excellent IDE for C++ programming.

You also may want to look into tile map editors and develop a decent workflow for making tile-based games.  I recommend Ogmo Editor for tile-based game design, because it is extremely flexible and keeps settings across your entire game project rather than per map.  I like Ogmo's ability to set prefabs for the entire project.

Whatever you choose to start with, make sure it is a platform that allows you to learn traditional programming structures and concepts.  Do not choose to start with Unity, because it does way too much for you.  You want to avoid game engines in general unless they are open source and somewhat simple.

Tap seems to be following the "full immersion" school of thought, which realistically will teach you to program faster if you have the patience to tackle the big learning curve.  However, I'm going to play devil's advocate for a moment and say that an engine that does a lot for you might be the absolute best way to start out.

This is because with an engine like that, you can get right into making games.  Since it already does a lot for you, most of the common functions will be taken care of, and you can produce a working game possibly without writing a single line of code.

You won't be totally satisfied with a game produced this way, though, because you'll invariably run into the limitations of what the canned functionality can do for you.  The way around this is to dip your toes into scripting (which is the opposite approach from what Tap was talking about) and write a few lines of code here and there to start out with.  Most likely, other people will have run into the same limitations that you have, so there will probably be web tutorials around that can give you some pointers on what to do.

I'm honestly not sure which of these approaches is the better one.  I'm 35, so when I first started to try to make games as a kid back in the 1980s, there just weren't any game creation kits around, so I pretty much had to try and write them myself.  I was never able to write anything more complicated than a simple text adventure until the early 90s.

I'm a reasonably good programmer now, and I learned how to do it the way Tap is talking about -- by jumping right in and doing it the old-fashioned way.  But doing it that way will involve a lot of false starts, and you need to be prepared for the fact that it'll take you quite a while to make anything more than the most basic stuff.

I agree with Bart that the jump-right-in approach is hard, but it is also very rewarding.  However, you could supplement the language and libraries I chose with slightly easier languages/libraries/IDEs, like AS3 combined with Flixel in FlashDevelop.  If you use a game engine, make sure it is open source for learning purposes.