ICicar·May 5, 2025Submission
Distributed server for social and realtime games and apps
32 points · Open discussionheroiclabs
nakama
Go2017–2025
heroiclabs / nakama
nakama
Scalable open-source game backend server: multiplayer, matchmaking, leaderboards, chat, and social features for games.
10Distinct people
12Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
13.7KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Scalable open-source game backend server: multiplayer, matchmaking, leaderboards, chat, and social features for games.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
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Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year12 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2017-03-06 16:25:37 UTC to 2025-05-05 16:57:43 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 2 | 1 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 2 | 1 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
12 sourcesNakama releases v3.23.0.Distributed server for social and realtime games
1 points · Open discussionHey HN.
We have a pretty cool tech stack to make a game like this possible, so I thought I'd give a writeup of how we did it.
We ship Goober Dash to multiple websites, iOS, Android, Mac App Store & Steam PC/Mac/Linux. We run timed deals on premium cosmetics and have advertising on the web versions.
We have a kubernetes cluster that has Agones [1] for game server orchestration, a custom written matchmaker, a fork of nakama [2] for the account system, our gameserver fleets (Godot in a docker container), some monitoring tools, a postgres database, and a bunch of ingress controller stuff. We run all of this out of Digital Ocean's nyc datacenter. Fun fact: my personal ping to nyc suddenly got much faster a few months ago (80ms -> 50ms).
We made this game in Godot 3 using a custom c++ netcode module for rollback and resimulation. This multiplay
Read the rest
er system supports websocket, webRTC and enet as a transport layer. The clients use a second thread to simulate from the server state to their current state. This second thread is usable even on the web when SharedArrayBuffer is available.
We made a level editor for this game where users can create levels. There are over 50,000 levels. Most of them are kinda throw away levels of users simply trying out the level editor, but there are some really cool levels too, like this 'flappy bird' level [3] or this one that uses crates in a cool way [4].
For this game, we wrote the majority of it in GDScript as a first prototype, but then before release we had to rewrite the gameplay loop in c++ to make it performant enough (we can hit 60fps on android web on many devices now).
We are a small company of 3 people up in Canada and we've been working our butts off for 3 years to make it work as an indie gaming studio. We're climbing and grinding, but still not crushing it. Personally, I think Goober Dash is a great game and deserves more attention. Would love to know what you think of it, and I can answer any questions about Godot as I have been using it professionally for years now.
[1] https://github.com/googleforgames/agones
[2] https://github.com/heroiclabs/nakama
[3] https://gooberdash.winterpixel.io/?play=f3ccaa3e-5c9c-41f8-8...
[4] https://gooberdash.winterpixel.io/?play=7eb9fe45-6f7d-4c8a-a...
Looks interesting. We've evaluating multiplayer server frameworks at the moment and have decided on Nakama (https://github.com/heroiclabs/nakama). Any thoughts on how Hathora compares? Particularly interested in the realtime multiplayer component, specifically around performance and scalability.
In Show HN: Hathora – Multiplayer Game Development Made EasyBuilding and running locally, I think? However, I can say this for sure.
https://github.com/heroiclabs/nakama
In Making an online multiplayer game with Godot and NakamaNakama: Distributed server for social and realtime games and apps
4 points · Open discussionHeroiclabs/nakama: Distributed server for social and realtime games and apps
4 points · Open discussionNakama 2.0 Released. App Server Built with GRPC in Go
3 points · Open discussionraises hand we're using them extensively. They're our database of choice that we've paired with Nakama[1] which is an open-source, distributed server. Have nothing but great things to say about the database itself in terms of growing performance and the team behind it :). They've been great to us since day-1.
[1] github.com/heroiclabs/nakama
In CockroachDB 2.0 Performance Makes Significant StridesI'd love to explore how this framework can be applied to Nakama (https://github.com/heroiclabs/nakama). I'll see if I can find some time to experiment with it over Christmas.
In Boardgame.io: State management and more for turn-based gamesAn open-source server for social and realtime apps
4 points · Open discussionShow HN: Nakama, a distributed server for social and realtime games and apps
12 points · Open discussion