[astrobe_]

How strange. I have tinkered with a couple of FOSS games of Windows and none of them required VS (not to mention another couple of other non-game projects). Maybe that's because they often are multi-platform projects so Make is the best choice at the global level for them?

> The lowest common denominator for build instructions that works everywhere is literally "set your include paths like so and compile these sources".

Yes, but that's quite inconvenient and error-prone ; a typo in a -D flag is very likely to not compile what you wanted.

Make is not a multi-megabyte program with a frack tonne of dependencies. Having your users to install it in order to build your project is far from being completely outrageous (unless for coughmicrosoftcough cults that consider the command-line is evil).