@czar
No worries, I'm open to different and contrasting points of view. Feel free to bring perspective to the table. All of us can benefit from such discussions.

Things have certainly changed in the past 5 years, that is for sure. As much as I love Pascal the hard fact is that most developers will use C/C++ for game development in general. I use Delphi for 99% of all my development, and want to do my part in providing the Pascal community options for game development. Most of the money made from engine sales will most likely be from the C/C++ crowd and that is why I modified things to work "out of the box" for C/C++. Even in the current build the C/C++ bindings are in sync with the Pascal ones. It took a bit of time to get that working (I don't really like C++ honestly, but it's a necessary evil in this case). I just have to get the examples done.

With all of that said, my overall goal will be game development. I made what has become HGE for my own game development needs. If others can benefit then great, it will only enhance the overall robustness of the engine. You can use it free of charge for your freeware projects and will be just a small indie friendly fee for use in commercial projects. The more people using it, the more feedback I get and that can go back into improving and making it more robust. What I get is real-world feedback for the 5011 different PC configurations out there and one of the things that make game development on the PC such a HUGE task. It's a win/win situation. I win because I now have info, feedback and improvements, and you win because you have an ready made engine that you can do your entire project with and/or for prototyping.

Is there a market for 2d games installed on a PC? Sure there is. The other platforms are very important too so HGE will eventually find it's way to them. Apple is being tight-fisted with 3rd party development tools so I have to watch this closely to see how that plays out. But for Linux and MacOS, I plan to be there soon. Once I get the API solid on Windows then I can explore other platforms. By this time a version of Delphi should be released that will make it a lot easier for me to move over the bulk of my existing code. However, a structure rewrite will be necessary since I will have to take advantage of OpenGL for acceleration on those platforms. The original design did not have cross platform in mind so, a rewrite has to be done. This is on the roadmap.

2D is still cool and lots of great things can be done with it on the PC with the right development tools and imagination. Having great tools that gives you power, choice and options is a must and, if I may say so, HGE has a rich feature set giving you lots of great features while not getting too much in the way. It consists mostly of a procedural API with a thin OOP layer on top that you may or may not use, it's up to you. This will give me a great jump start building my game projects, as I now can concentrate on making the game, fixing bugs, and adding features as needed.

If you have some time, check out HGE and let me know if the examples compile and run on your configuration. This will be invaluable to me. Explore the HGE unit and see all that it currently offers. If you hate or like HGE, no worries I'm open to feedback and my goal is to make it better, so feel free to comment one way or the other.