I don't think I'd be able to push out bleeding-edge graphics (I have my own cartoony style, if I'm making the graphics myself), I think AI, Story telling, and Level Design would be my strong suits in this poll. A lot of games have been doing poorly in these areas IMO as well.

As for a year long competition, I really wouldn't encourage that for PGD. Going for a year means you will have to have a _huge_ base of entrants, who are working in teams.

To be honest, I wouldn't even bother joining a year long competition. The most I'd consider is 3mo, although I might eventually start work on an RPG idea I've had that could easily take a year.

[Incoming tangent]
Given a year to fiddle though, I would love to explore 3d in Pascal. Fact is, I've already done a lot of research in this department, and there are absolutely _no_ good FPC-compatible cross platform (win/lin at the very least) libs, headers, conversions, etc available. GLScene is the only slightly useable lib I've found so far, and that is really limited to drawing 3d textured models. No advanced lighting, physics, or 80% of the demos even compile, and the 20% that do pretty much require you to patch them up. It's quite sad really.

There's just not a lot happening in the Pascal gaming world. Andorra's lacking, buggy in places, but it's the only decent enough 2d lib I've found. Heck, the main things lacking so far for me are 1) Patched up pixel perfect collisions [because apparently it doesn't work on all video cards] 2) Regressions in code (eg: can no longer switch to FS mode while game is running) 3) No easy way to do pre-rendering 4) No easy way to capture the game screen.

After a long conversation on the Lazarus forums, I found someone who had made a graphics lib that could handle the type of prerendering I want (with alpha blending PNGs), but it's slow, involves saving the images and reloading them on top of the length of time it takes to generate the images.

To be honest, it's annoyingly hard to create any type of game with FPC. I've had to stitch together elements to do anything, (Andorra for graphics + SDL for sound). SDL in itself is even too lacking.

Sad state of affairs. Someone needs to step up and create some shiny new working, relatively complete engines, or patch up the old ones. *Sigh* [/end of random tangent]