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heroiclabs/nakama-unreal
Nakama Unreal Client SDK
The official Unreal Engine plugin for Nakama, HeroicLabs' open-source game backend. It wraps the full Nakama API — auth, chat, matchmaking, storage, leaderboards, parties — in Unreal-native types with both C++ and Blueprint paths. The target is game studios who want a self-hosted backend without writing their own socket and session management.
Blueprint support is genuinely complete, not an afterthought — every API call is exposed with proper Unreal delegates and the included demo project covers nearly every feature. The dual callback pattern (dynamic multicast delegates for reuse, lambdas for one-offs) is the right call for Unreal and is explained clearly. The plugin wraps everything in UPROPERTY/UFUNCTION correctly, so GC won't silently eat your client objects. Test coverage is real — both editor-based and command-line automation tests exist across auth, match, storage, parties, and retries.
The plugin ships no thread-safety guarantees and the tick system runs on the game thread, so any high-frequency socket message will block rendering — fine for lobby games, a problem for anything action-oriented. Documentation lives almost entirely in heroiclabs.com docs behind a separate site, meaning the README is a getting-started guide that stops before you hit anything complicated. Blueprint-only users are quietly told they need a third-party JSON plugin to do anything useful with storage or chat, which is a significant gap for the audience the Blueprint module targets. No mention of WebSocket reconnection behavior or what happens to in-flight requests when the connection drops mid-match — you have to read the source or hit it in production.