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I wrote a commercial game in C in 2025

For the last few years we’ve been working on a train management game, Iron Roads, which we released to Early Access today. Somewhat atypically for a game releasing in 2025, Iron Roads is written in pure C, not C++, pure C99.

The pathfinding calculations are complex, run frequently, and I knew I would spend a lot of time optimising the engine to support large numbers of trains It would need to be portable to a wide range of platforms. C/C++ are provided by all platform owners, so they are safe choices, and C# has enough corporate momentum behind it to more or less guarantee a port, but beyond that the only languages I felt confident I could rely on being available were those that embed in C, like Lua, or those that compile to it, like Nim (aka the prototype I regret not writing! Given that I always knew I’d be writing the “content” in Lua, my priority for the C code was to build a highly efficient and reliable engine for routing trains, ticking their positions, and rendering it all.

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