The surprise successor to the highly praised indie RPG adventure game UNDERTALE called DELTARUNE has been unofficially ported to Linux by a fan through clever hacks.

DELTARUNE, or rather its first chapter, was released with a cryptic announcement on http://www.deltarune.com for free on Windows and Mac but a Linux version was sadly not released at launch. However, thanks to a DELTARUNE fan on Reddit, we now have unofficial native port of the game.

The Reddit user JohnWatson78 posted their port on the DELTARUNE subreddit and afterwards updated their post with instructions on how they managed to make the game run on Linux.

Essentially, they extracted the officially released version of the game, made sure the files were in the correct places and in lowercase letters and found a compatible GameMaker "runner" executable that could then load the game assets. The main issue was finding a suitable runner file by browsing existing Linux GameMaker ports. You can naturally find the more detailed step-by-step guide in JohnWatson78's Reddit post.

So, to clarify, this is an actual native port and doesn't rely on utilizing Wine or other compatibility modes, just feeding the game data to a version of the game engine that can understand said data.

This is a very cool thing for a couple of reasons. Firstly, and without further spoilers, DELTARUNE is a very cool game and UNDERTALE fans hungering for more content will surely be pleased to be able to play the game. Also, running the Windows version in Wine, while doable, causes some small issues like the game running at 2x the normal speed unless specifically restricted to 30 FPS (I thought I was just bad at the game but at least my next playthrough will be easy). This issue should not affect the native port.

However, another prospect of this port is that we now have a detailed process to follow in order to make future fan-ports of GameMaker games with relatively little effort. While we may wish that the devs themselves handled this part for us (and I still hope Toby Fox makes an official port), it's a fact of life that some developers will never make a proper port. Now we at least have a way to make such games potentially run on Linux on our own. And who knows, perhaps the community being able to pull off a port on their own will convince the developers to release an official port in time.