A game engine is anything from a set of libraries to pre-compiled game code that you can use to make a game out of. The some or most of the basic gameplay is already made up for you, you just have to finish it off. The idea is that it does most of the basic stuff for you to be able to get to the more advanced things in your games.
I'm going to contradict Jason and Jeremy now. It's not that they are wrong, but they are speaking from the perspective of someone who has been making games and game tools for a while now. Unfortunately you have to crawl a bit before you can first walk.
At your level you should not be playing with pre-made game engines and design docs just yet. Later on definitely, but not now.
For now learn the BASICS. You need to understand all those basic things that an engine will do for you. Otherwise you'll be so dependent on the engines to do it all for you, you wont know how to do something if it's not in the engine. Plus it not only helps, but it is essential that you know what these things are so you can properly make a game so your not always poking around blindly and wasting your own time.
Documentation would be a waste of your time as well. With what you have to learn it's not worth it. And you are doing this for the pure benefit of learning. You won't be making anything worthy of a polished commercial or shareware/freeware release. Not yet... Docs are meant to help you keep on track of your project's plans and stay on task. A simple pong game to learn the ability of basic collision detection and object movement is hardly the kind of task that needs a design doc.
I was pondering if I should write a couple of quick and dirty beginners/entry level tutorials on these things. It helps to have material to learn from at the beginning of course, yet there is so little for Pascal programmers. And the older stuff always seems to disappear over time. Maybe others can chip in too. It would basically involve all the simple things us more novice to advanced guys usually take for granted.
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