To build the engine and its vendored dependencies, install the following tools on your developer machine. On Windows the commands below assume Scoop — substitute winget, choco or a manual install if you prefer.

Tool	Purpose	Install (Windows)
Visual Studio 2022	MSVC toolchain, MSBuild, vswhere	Installer — with the Desktop development with C++ workload
.NET SDK 10	Builds the `bin/BuildTool` C# orchestrator, also required for scripting	https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download
CMake	Builds `GlitchyEngineHelper` and some vendor libs	`scoop install cmake` or `winget install cmake`
Python 3 + pip	Required by Meson and some vendor build scripts	`winget install Python.Python.3.13` (or use uv)
Meson	Configures Freetype, Harfbuzz, Fribidi builds	`uv tool install meson` or `pip install --user meson`
Ninja	Backend build system used by Meson	`scoop install ninja` or `winget install Ninja-build.Ninja`
pkg-config	Resolves library metadata during Meson builds	`scoop install pkg-config`
Beef compiler (`beefbuild`)	Compiles the Beef workspace	https://www.beeflang.org/

The BuildTool (bin/BuildTool) orchestrates the vendor-library builds and the Beef workspace compile. To verify your environment is ready, run:

./bin/BuildTool.exe build list

You should see a list of modules (Box2D, FreetypeStack, BeefWorkspace, …) and the topologically-sorted build order. Running individual modules takes the form:

./bin/BuildTool.exe build --release FreetypeStack