Indie Dev Uses C for a 2025 Commercial Game: A Postmortem

Cowleyfornia Studios released their train management game, *Iron Roads*, in 2025, surprisingly written in pure C (C99) instead of C++. The choice stemmed from a desire for portability, simplicity, and most importantly, code clarity to manage memory allocation and performance. Prototypes in Haskell, Go, and Rust were explored, but ultimately C (approx. 40,000 lines of code) and Lua (approx. 8,000 lines for higher-level logic) were chosen. The developer found C's fast compilation and ease of optimization beneficial to the workflow, but admitted to challenges with serialization and boilerplate. While happy with the outcome, they are unlikely to repeat the process, leaning towards modern, higher-level languages that compile to C, like Nim, for future projects.