What is Kristal (kristal.cc)?

Updated

Kristal is a DELTARUNE fangame and battle engine built with LÖVE, hosted at kristal.cc. It lets you create custom DELTARUNE worlds, battles, and more. It is aimed at people who want to build their own DELTARUNE-style game rather than just play one, and using it requires knowing Lua or being willing to learn it.

What you can build with it

The site describes Kristal as a "powerful DELTARUNE fangame and battle engine." In practice that means two overlapping uses:

  • Custom worlds — your own Dark Worlds and exploration areas in the DELTARUNE style.
  • Custom battles — encounter and battle systems, since the engine is described specifically as a battle engine as well.

Because it is an engine rather than a single game, the output is whatever you design on top of it.

What the site shows

Beyond the engine itself, kristal.cc displays screenshots and examples of fangames made with Kristal, which is useful for judging what the engine can actually produce. Examples listed on the page include:

Project By Premise
#th Sanctuary Ralszor & Project Sanctum Team Liminal exploration crossed with Dark Worlds
DELTARUNE: Frostveil Duskkii A take on Chapter 5's Weird Route
Plugged Dream Funkin's Garbage A console, a dusty screen, and one last challenge
Deltarune: UZUMAKI RazFraz, Emily Ember Ignatus Bunnington & Team Raspberry Play snippets of hypothetical Chapters 3–7
No Words Spoken AcousticJamm Kris can no longer hear your voice
Godhome Vitellary 40+ boss fights, challenge modes, a unique ending
Deoxynn AcousticJamm A choice-driven adventure through Europa
Frozen Heart Simbel The end of the Snowgrave Route from another place
Deltamon Riverstar A creature-collecting journey through Kris's home region

These span battle-focused, exploration-focused, and narrative-focused designs, so they are a reasonable way to gauge whether the engine fits what you have in mind.

Getting started

The site points to its wiki for information on how to use Kristal. The one hard prerequisite it states directly is Lua: you must know Lua, or be willing to learn it. A Lua tutorial is provided on the site to help you start.

So the practical path is:

  1. Read the wiki for how the engine is structured and used.
  2. Work through the Lua tutorial if you are not already comfortable with Lua.
  3. Look at the example projects to see what the engine supports in practice.

Contributing

If you want to help with Kristal itself rather than just use it, the site invites you to look through the source code and contribute. That makes it an open project you can inspect and improve, not only a download.