I have not downloaded the program mentioned above. But if anyone knows how easy it is to make games with it, can someone explain to me the basics. I am not sure of it's strong points and it's weak points. Would it need a full knowledge of programming.

in a nutshell you need to know how to program pretty well to get anywhere with it. but if i remember rightly Torqe created like a point n click game creator that you can buy for it or something, i wouldnt bother with it personally, xna and c# are not hard to learn at all i figure with a couple of hours a night you could get something up within a week and it'll go from there. theres so much documentation for xna! a little googling and youll have an immense amount of resources, and with it being a microsoft thing you have support and a massive community to help you! all in all there is a learning curve but not a difficult one

From my understanding as a DirectX programmer, XNA is basically a SDK that works with DX so that you can create games for the Xbox. If you are writting a game, you need to have a much better understanding of game structure and how to plan a game than coding since coding tends to be the easy part. I have written games before for class and even for fun and the most important step is planning how the game parts will work together because without it, you have no way of getting all the parts to work together.

i agree with fffanatics, a good, logical design knowledge is imperitive when making games, going on in there like a bull in a china shop just doesnt work! but after a while programming you should have a decent library of code that you can re-use for instance collision classes and other classes like animation. this again saves you alot of time and also allows you to evolve as a developer by building on what you already have

i am a kiddo in programming and the only thing i can gurantee is that yes it is to do with programming and its not one of those wysiwig programs. IF you dont know much of game programming then i can tell you something. You could download a free software name game make.Search it on google. Its a very easy one and has a ton of good quality tutorials for you to learn the software in a second. I have made 2 games from the software. One is a game like pac man which is the first game and the easiest to make. Second game i made was a platform game. the char was a football and then reach the goal in the end. I made 3 levels and then left it as it wasnt a flash game. I needed a flash game for a website.
And yes , the thing you mentioned about the google thing . Its so completely right. You can get a ton of information due ot google.