Do I need a graphics engine?

[SilverWarior]

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.

I must say that I'm a bit surprised by hearing that. I guess that large difference between older stable version of FPC/Lazarus and newest might be the cause for this. Besides since FPC/Lazarus is completely free PXL author is probably expecting that everyone is using latest version which could not be said for Delphi developers since they have to be paying yearly subscription in order to keeping their development environment up to date.

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!

I'm afraid there is no specific guide on starting out with PXL. I think there was a guide for one of its predecessors so you might want to do some searching through http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com...erly-PowerDraw) part of our form which contains lots of information for working with PXL predecessors. Also check the forums at PXL official site.
But checking and studying the demos might also be enough. It was for me but I must admit that I had at least some basic knowledge on working with graphics before from short time usage of few other graphical engines before their development was canceled. For some reason I mostly started using of these graphical engines just before they got canceled so I never even got learn to use them properly as I did with Asphyre Sphinx 2 and later Asphyre Sphinx 3.
Any way I recommend you start fiddling with demos and if you run in to some questions ask them here on PGD and we will try to help.

As for general guides about working with graphics. I'm afraid I can't give you any suggestion on them because I myself never read any of them.
I learned most about how graphics in games are done by close observation from a lots of games that I have played in my life. This also included of extracting and checking of game resources like textures, animations, etc. You won't believe of how much you can learn only by checking of these.
I also learned a lot about working on graphics by communicating with other game developers many of which are not even here on PGD nor they use Object Pascal for creation of their games.

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...

I didn't mean to scare you but merely say that there is no graphical which would be so much better than the others because it does not allow you to screw up.
Any way if you do happen to screw things so badly to bring the graphical engine to a halt do post your problems here and we will solve them together.
And yes many times you can learn most by screwing up first That is how I learned most about computers.
Back in the days I used to purposely delete or rename various windows files to see what would stop working
And I even fried few computer components but this was not on purpose

Any way we are here to lend you a hand when you will need it. I myself didn't had this luxury or didn't know where to get help when I started fiddling with graphics myself. So I had to learn it the hard way.