Pascal Game Development FAQ

Here you can find answers to questions about how the board works. Use the links or search box below to find your way around.

What is the PGD Annual?

NOTE: The PGD Annual has been officially retired! However, this does not mean that the PGD community will not be doing competitions. Please check out the PGD Challenge Mini Competitions for the newer game developer's competition event that will be taking place more frequently.

The PGD Annual is a yearly game developer competition for the greater pascal game developer community. All pascal developers and their game creating teams are welcome and highly encouraged to participate in this huge event. It usually takes place once a year under the volunteering 'Chief Organizer' for the event. All entrants, must follow a gameplay based theme and be written in either Pascal or Object Pascal.

The first PGD Annual competition took place in January 2005 to celebrate the creation of the creation of PGD website and growing community. The competitions took place over the following two consecutive years each based on a new gameplay theme than the previous. Unfortunately due to many Staff changes and shifts in the PGD site runners personal obligations there was no event in 2008. However with the help of new Staff a new competition was held in 2009. Each competition was sponsored by various well known tool developer companies such as Borland, Caligari, Firelight Studios, Cengage and several other private prize donors.

The PGD Annual website was created by Christina Warne for the 2009 competition to better organize the registering teams and submissions of future competitions after the PGD website had gone through a major overhaul of it's original forum software. Though not finished, it was functional enough to be used for the 2009 competition and is now currently undergoing heavy development for the remainder of it's remaining missed features. The current state of the competition site can be seen at www.PGDAnnual.com.

Previous PGD Annual competitions and their themes:

  • 2005 PGD Dogfight Competition: Player vs. player vehicle combat. (Ran by Dominique Louis.)
  • 2006 PGD Annual 'Big Boss' Competition: Level based games with boss challenges in each. (Ran by Jason McMillen.)
  • 2007 PGD Annual 'Multiplexity' Competition: Multiple game genre mixed together into a single game. (Ran by Jason McMillen.)
  • 2009 PGD Annual 'Arcadia' Competition: Arcade style games. (Ran by Christina Warne.)

How come I can't find a page for one of the old competitions?

There has been a PGD Annual Game Developer's Competition showcase created at Pascal Gamer Magazine's website. You can view the archive of all past PGD Annual competitions and have access to competition entries, scores and media from the event at www.pascalgamer.com/pgdannual!

The PGD Competitions website is currently under development to provide everyone with a completed second version of the original PGD Annual competitions website. Status of the progress of the site is currently unknown, however an announcement will be made once the site is ready for public launch.

Why has the PGD Annual been retired?

The original intent of the PGD Annual was to create a yearly series of competitions themed around game-play concepts to help bolster the interest in making games with the Pascal programming language and it's other evolved dialects. Eventually as the event got bigger and bigger from year to year, PGD no longer had enough staff and people interested in volunteering to keep the event going from year to year.

There was an effort to relaunch the PGD Annual from 2009 and on, however the careers of those who were running PGD from that time would not allow for such a project and thus there was not a competition in 2010 or 2011. It was apparent that the PGD Annual could not function as it was originally intended so it was in the best interest to retire it.

Since there is still interest in competition events within the PGD community, the PGD Challenge, a smaller and easier to organize mini competition, was created to take it's place. Instead of a long development cycle of 4 months, it was decided that it would be only 3 to 4 weeks approximately and without the need for sponsorship and prizes, there could be more in a year than just the one.

The PGD Annual has been retired, but the spirit of those competitions will still carry on as the PGD Challenge.

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