Thanks for the great reply. This helps a lot!
My weekend got really busy, so I wasn't really able to do anything programming related until yesterday evening.

What you said makes a lot of sense, so I'm definitely going to try and learn how to do this.
As you said, graphics is something I'm going to have to learn sooner or later, so I might as well try and learn it now.

What you said about being able to render the background separately sounds really good. I've already experimented with making a animated non-interactive background to the main game screen(basically just a view of space, with stars passing by in the background), but couldn't figure out any way to do it efficiently, using only lazarus.


I downloaded PXL yesterday. It took me way too long time to get it to work(turned out I had a old version of Lazarus), but as far as I can tell, it looks really good.
Is there any guide to how I can get started using the library? Or any general guide to graphics programming, that might help me? The documentation of the specific parts is pretty good, but it still all assumes I actually know what I'm doing!
From just looking at it, I can understand(or at least guess) how most parts of it works, and I could probably get by just copying code from the examples, but I don't like writing code that I don't understand. Plus it seems like it could very well become inefficient in the long run.
I'm a little worried since you said most graphics engines could grind to a halt if I don't know what I'm doing...

Any further help would be appreciated!