LITURGICAL NOOB AHEAD you've been warned!

Greetings everyone, I just joined up acupulla days ago. I am really stoked about using T2D! it looks ossum. Anyway, I have never successfully created a real game before. I'm an artist who loves gaming and computers, mostly I do Dadaism and surrealist abstract expressionism objects with things like spray paint, junkyard appliances, even living dirt sculptures. Frustratingly, I can't even dip my big toe in the water because I don't know where to find the pool!XD I'm used to D.I.Y., doing everything by hand, cutting paper with tiny knives and mixing egg whites with colored dust to make tempera paint. I think the last time I issued text commands to a computer was in elementary school on an APPLE ][. Not long after that, I built things that resembled games using ver. 1.0 of an application called Hyper Studio, which was intended for presentation media. I alienated my peers in high school with GIFs and camcorder claymation, but the takeaway is: aside from art, I ain't gotta clue.

Getting to the point, for the last five years I've been drawing pixel people and things in MS paint. It started out as a time wank, but soon it became apparent that I had a real project on my hands, with hundreds of characters and objects. About two years ago, I downloaded GameMaker onto a wheezing and well-traveled tower, complete with funny smell and scavenged CRT monitor. I knew what I was doing was stupid and foolhardy. I drove that poor machine like a rented mule; my lust for breathing the life of animation into my little sprites was too intoxicating. The video card on this thing was designed to just barely run Office XP. Until that point, I had never seen a computer really break, or a hard drive fail, but it actually CAUGHT ON FIRE. Amongst a great many other things, I literally lost THOUSANDS of frames of animation, each one a hand-rendered bitmap, amounting to many wasted months. I'll spare you the intimate details of the subsequent grief and abject despair, I'm sure you all have had similar lost work accidents, and I've subjected you good people to enough already. Understand, I never at any point gave up on the project. I saved up for a contemporary device- I use windows 7 now and back up everything like a normal person.

In summary, 5 years in-I have a mountain of artwork and a science fiction novel, zero programming skills, and apparently no idea how to use this app. The 'getting started' video actually made me dizzy and the documentation seems to be incomplete, but that's probably my fault somehow. Where should I start? Recommended reading anyone? Is this the application for me? Is the beginner forum too advanced? Is there a 'naive' section? Thank you for reading this.