Hello everyone and a late Happy New Year!

It's been some time since I've done a site-wide community announcement, but I felt that I should say something to ring in the new year and let you all know that I'm still around and keeping an eye on things. In fact I've been working on a few things for the community that I'm sure will keep you excited about the coming year.



The first really big thing is that I have been in talks with RemObjects' Jim McKeeth and PP4S's Dr. Norman Morrison about getting the Oxygene for Java developer tools into classrooms. I made the introductions and asked what Marc Hoffman, RemObject's CEO and founder thought of providing some sort of educational license for a single school to start up a pilot program through the 'Pascal Programming for Schools' project. Dr. Morrison has discussed this with his own school's headmaster in England and got him interested. His school is now persuing a program with lessons designed using the new Oxygene language that would even allow them to put their projects on mobile devices right in class. Further you can now access tutorials that will be a basis for these highschool computer science classes on the PP4S website right here!


The other great piece of news is that I've started work back up on the Pascal Gamer Magazine Issue #4. I'm hoping to publish it soon with some of the articles I currently have, plus any others I can get my hands on over the next month or so. If you would like to publish a tutorial or article that you think would go great in the magazine, please feel free to contact me at Contact@pascalgamer.com! I would love to read and especially publish your article in the next issue. Thanks again and sorry for the delay for all those of you who have submitted articles and have been wondering if it went to waste. A: No it has not, and yes it will be published in Issue #4!

Back Issues of Pascal Gamer Magazine are available at www.pascalgamer.com!


I'm still thinking about when to do the next PGD Challenge and what it will be. If you have any suggestions or thoughts or just want to show your interest and excitement, please let us know! Better yet, let us know when you would be best available to participate. I believe we have a discussion thread already open in the forums. If not we should create one.

I'd like to keep these competitions going so if you are interested in helping we will of course need a pair of judges to score at the end of the competition. The only prerequisite is that you have both a Mac and Windows machine and can commit to set aside some time to score all final entries. I will be using Dropbox to organize the judging process.


Want to learn more about the PGD Challenge mini game developer competitions? Read up and try past entries at www.pgdchallenge.com!


All those wandering what I've been up to, besides becoming a daddy this last September, I've been hard to work on my 2 key titles under the new Red Ant Games company; Garland's Quest and Subject 33 due out for mobiles and the OUYA gaming console. I have also been working on a comic book (or graphics novel) series that I am writing. I'll be announcing more as we get close to the completion of the first issue.

Garland's Quest will probably see a 2014 release with a crowd funding campaign sometime this year. While Subject 33 will be a much smaller project that both Paul Nicholls and I are going to push to the Android and OUYA platforms early this year. Zack Parrish is currently working on both games' soundtracks. He is a very talented musician and we are excited about his involvement in both projects.

You can read more about Red Ant Games at www.redantgames.com!


2012 has been a good year, obvious reasons for me personally, but we have had a lot of great things happen for the community too. The new Nougat project announcement, Embarcadero's announcement of a roadmap for mobile development tools and lets not forget the epic 1.0 release of Lazarus. Let us also not forget the release of a 4th development tool, Smart Mobile Studio that will allow us to create HTML5 and JavaScript based web apps using Object Pascal code.




Add to that the exciting new OUYA console's successful kickstarter which will give many commercial opportunities for those indie game developers hoping to get their games on a REAL gaming console. So instead of another year of "more of the same," we have much new things to explore in the new year.


So with that I will end my first news post of the year. Happy coding everyone and have a very successful and fun year this 2013!