Ok firstly... EVERYONE has good points. So lets just get that outta the way.

Now here is how I personally feel about it.

[size=9px](Dom is the all mighty high grand lord --with sprinkles-- of the PGD Annual this year so it's all his call. Not mine this time.)[/size]

The purpose of the competitions are to help grow the Pascal game making world as a whole. And it's also for fun, but we have that anyways, don't we?

A person can have a pre-made game engine and the game still sucks. ie. Star Trek Armada 2 [size=9px](had Armada 1 as a code-base, but screwed the game up in 2. Sorry if you liked it.)[/size], Star Wars Battlegrounds [size=9px](used AoE2's engine)[/size], etc... I'm sure you have your own crappy games lists out there, but these ones were done for at least half a year's time with a budget.

Which leads me into my second point, the Independent Games Festival. I believe as Jeremy just mentioned most if not all of the other games presented there have a much longer development time-frame, Some are even over a year or more. Going up against these guys is sort of becoming the main theme and your top prize since last year. [size=9px](along with whatever super cool version of Delphi Borland/CodeGear has been juicing up the prizes with :thumbup: --Thanks sponsors! )[/size]

So if we want the winning entry to stand out in the IGF with the best possible chance there, making them start over is kind of a rough rub, no?


Here is my whole underlying ethos on this... The more experienced developers/teams that take part in the PGD Annual are going to have an edge anyhow. New people will want to participate to learn from it and have fun. If they are talented then they may win a few prizes or not.

So as I've said before a crappy game can be made off a good engine and a fun game can be made from nothing all the same. But what we want to do is build up the competitions from year to year and this means not only participation, prizes and cool new ideas for the competitions, but also have each year's teams come back more experienced. And in time they will come back with more punch from last year so that it becomes an ongoing thing, not just something that we do each year to win a free copy of new Delphi and bug the IGF people about Pascal.