Best all around FREE product on the market for 2D game making

I really really really want to love Stencyl. I keep trying to squeeze its potential awesomeness out. Stencyl is "a drag-and-drop gameplay designer" (Stencyl website), modeled after the MIT Scratch project. Basically, it's blocks-based programming made specifically for game design. The sweet part for teachers is that it is free. I've been using this for a couple of years now. This definitely gives students more freedom and challenge than Gamestar. It seems, though, to be very buggy. Stencylforge, Stencyl's marketplace for user-created resources is heavily promoted within the application as the main source for graphics, sounds, behaviors etc. Unfortunately, this fall, Stencylforge was down more than it was up, rendering the whole program a bit clunky and useless and leaving students frustrated and stranded. Stencyl is awesome for making Platformer Games, but when it comes to something more robust, like an RPG, Stencyl has more glitches and frustration than success. Most of it's kits were designed on a previous version and break once imported into the new version. Most of my students do not have the level of experience with the program necessary to troubleshoot what's broken.

Similar in format to Weebly or PowToon (easy, drag & drop, etc.). Lots of tutorials available, both video & screenshot, created by users and the vendor. I don't think you'd be able to use Stencyl with students younger than 7th grade, unless you have a lot of very tech-savvy students who could help others. Creating a basic game is fairly easy, especially if coupled with a tutorial. Techy high schoolers would have few problems, especially if they worked together. There are extremely useful video tutorials, and I had a tutorial on one screen, and the program on the other and just went back & forth mimicking the tutorial.

Stencyl like Scratch is a great way for young students to "learn" programming. With it they begin to understand what lines of codes are. There is math involved and thinking ahead.