You're right, I had threaded timers in my head at the time. Still I warn against them. Not useful knowledge at this time.

Well anyways, the non-use of a timer is my personal preference. I don 't use them because I see no value in them the way I make games, but then I've advanced far enough to find my own ways of doing things, 'right' or 'wrong'.

The best way to go about learning the basics is to throw out any of the more modern stuff and just go with basic pascal. I know some might freak out at that idea considering that OOP is 'the way to go' nowadays, but remember that Object Pascal is an extension of the original Pascal.

Just for your own good stay away from pointers, manual memory allocation and the like at this stage and you'll be fine.

As for Lazarus, you don't need to make an 'Application' project. Instead choose 'Program' under File -> New...

This is the most minimalistic template you will start with. And the IDE features of Lazarus will help you a lot! This is how I start most of my new game projects actually.

In fact, if you like I can make a basic template for use with Lazarus if you like?