It's very primitive, but it shows how much you can do with a bunch of characters if you know how to handle them.
After one semester of basic Java studies, I could already make a basic MasterMind game. It was like 5 years after I had made my first games off GameMaker.
Seriously if anyone is interested to know more about GameMaker and to start working with it, you can count me as a reference.
A semester of Java? I'm jealous. Hopefully I get that next semester as I have a module on OOP and I don't see why they wouldn't put us onto Java for that. At the moment I'm stuck doing Python which I'm not really fond of.
Oh the good old Game Maker days - it's good for game making obviously and it's the best tool for quickly testing things out. Because of Game Maker I got into programming and it pretty much turned my life around, it's definitely worth the price tag but now I've moved on to Java. I wouldn't stick with it and try to make a career out of it, just let it teach you the programming basics and it'll help you out enormously.