Twine allows you to design and write interactive fiction / text based adventures. Twine provides a graphic interface that links the parts of your stories together and provides a map that can change based on the organization / reorganization of the elements of your story. The completed story is outputted as a text based adventure that can be shared and played online.
Get Lamp is probably the definitive (if not only) documentary on the text adventure genre of games. The advent of the text adventure was a defining moment in the game industry as it was essentially the first time that companies were developed specifically to write and produce computer games.
This site provides an introduction to interactive fiction and some guidance in terms of downloading and playing text based adventure / interactive fiction games.
textadventures.co.uk provides a web based and desktop (Windows only) tool for creating text based adventures (interactive fiction). The stie also serves as an online community to share your creations.
This site walks you through the basics of adventure games including an Introduction to Interactive Fiction and how to download and play Adventure Games.
This is a very helpful video tutorial on how to make a platformer game in Game Maker 7, but it does also apply to Game Maker 8. It goes through the basics by actually showing you how to make the objects on-screen.
this shows you everything from game art to programming, and shows links to other sites with extensive info. It shows more than enough enough info than you need to really know, so it is useful for an online resource.
This provides sprites and backgrounds. It is a nice website that helps you to use many different kinds of sprites. I hope that nobody has contributed this yet.
This sprite resource provides hundreds of sprite sheets that can be used for gamemaker. It has topics relating to games, and has topics in alphabetical order. This website is really useful for gamemaker games as it can be used for the adventure games
This resource is a whole list of sprites that work well with the Game Maker software. This is valuable because if you need some sprites, look no further, there are hundreds on this site (including Nyan Cat)!
The Scholastic Level Up program offers curriculum for grades 7 - 12 in video game design across the curriculum. The program focuses on the use of Gamestar Mechanic and Activate
Use the free Sprite Maker tool to create your own sprites. It is really easy to use and you can very quickly create a character with his own unique outfit. You will be creating your own sprites in seconds. When you have finished customizing you can export out your sprite and use it in your game.
There are many sprite sites out there, and many of them have sprites others don't. So, to save you the trouble of googling multiple sites for a specific sprite, I'm posting a THIRD sprite site. I know of a couple more, too. This one is great because they copied the sprites from their favorite videogames. There are many users, all posting sprites!
Whilst surfing the web, I found not another sprite page, but a forum containing MANY sprite page links! Individual sprite pages are useful, but this is a solid block of links leading to different sprite, background, etc pages! The guy who posted this forum is quite helpful to us who are too lazy to look for pages ourselves.