So I have a visual studio 2008 project setup for a project I've been working on however its a sub project of a rather larger code base which is crossplatform, so in order to make my project complaint with the main source I need to make my project nix compilable.
Is there some way I can generate a makefile based off my vcproject? or if not is there someway I could generate a makefile any other way than writing it manually as it appears confusing as all hell when I open them up.
Microsoft has dropped the support for exporting a solution into a makefile (see this thread). I'm not aware of any external tools that convert VS solutions to makefiles. But i had some success using CMake. With CMake you describe a project in a textfile and cmake then generates standard makefiles or project descriptions for IDE's (including VS).
Nobody ever writes a Makefile. They take an existing Makefile and modify it.
Get one of the makefiles from the existing projects and adjust it to your project (i.e. replace project name, source/object files, etc).
Other than that, simple makefiles are not so difficult, here's a very short introduction to makefiles to get you started.