Not much success today. I expected the process to be much easier once I installed Visual Studio but there were still problems.

I installed FreeType with VCPKG and managed to set the FREETYPE_LIBRARY and FREETYPE_INCLUDE_DIRS variables to the correct paths in the findfreetype.cmake file.

set(FREETYPE_LIBRARY "C:/Users/chris/scoop/apps/vcpkg/2024.03.25/packages/freetype_x64-windows/lib")
set(FREETYPE_INCLUDE_DIRS "C:/Users/chris/scoop/apps/vcpkg/2024.03.25/packages/freetype_x64-windows/include")

After this, I was able to execute the following command to download the submodules and set up the builds folder:

cmake -S root -B buildsfolder -G "MinGW Makefiles"

Then, I compiled and built each library with MinGW and tried to build a .exe file. The build process was failing because MinGW did not have access to the FreeType library. I was unable to fix the issue and tried to compile the game with MSVC but the building was failing because it was unable to install the codecs that the SDL image gallery needed to work. MinGW did not have this problem.

What should I do now?

There are various solutions here. Clang can cross-compile, I can use MinWG on the Mac to create a Windows build or use docker. I'll study my options tomorrow to find the best possible solution.