Solana Gaming SDKs
With Solana being a high performance blockchain with low fees and fast transactions, a great game developer community has formed around it.
Here you can find details about the Solana game development SDKs available within the ecosystem. All the SDKs, except GameShift, are open source and community built. If you are working on a SDK yourself feel free to open a PR to this page and add it.
Unity SDK
The Unity game engine is known for its beginner friendly approach and cross platform support including WebGL, iOS, and Android. Build once, export everywhere.
The Solana Unity SDK is maintained by Magicblock and comes with:
- NFT support
- Candy machine integration
- Transactions
- RPC functions
- Phantom deep links
- WebGL connector
- Reliable WebSocket connection support
- Mobile wallet-adapter
- Sessions keys for auto approving transaction
- Anchor client code generation and more.
Godot SDK
The Godot Engine is an open source game engine which gained lots of support in the last few years. The Solana SDK for Godot is maintained by ZenRepublic and Virus-Axel. It comes with a wallet adapter integration, transactions, RPC functions, and Anchor client code generation. Even a fully functional Metaplex candy machine integration.
Solana GameShift
Solana GameShift is an API solution, developed by Solana Labs, to integrate Solana into your game, including the ability to easily mint and change assets. It also supports USDC on-ramps and in-game marketplaces. You can onboard your players without creating or managing blockchain key phrases and easily let them pay with credit card payments.
Turbo.Computer - Rust Game Engine
Turbo is a rust game engine written from the ground up to focus on Solana, with a lightweight architecture and fast iteration times. It is beginner friendly and comes with full Solana RPC support. You can even use its AI tools to generate complete games.
Honeycomb Protocol
Honeycomb provides a suite of onchain programs and state-compression tools that handle all crucial game lifecycle functions and composability within the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM). It supports lots of NFT functionality like staking, missions, loot boxes, player profiles, state compression, auto approving transactions and more.
Unreal SDKs
Unreal Engine is known for its great visuals and node based scripting framework. There are multiple Solana SDKs maintained by different companies.
Bitfrost Unreal SDK
Bitfrost is working on an Unreal SDK which was already used in multiple games
built during recent Solana game jams. It comes with C# solnet
support in C++
and Blueprints, minting of metaplex NFTs, payment processor examples in game
wallet and more.
Thugz Unreal SDK
Thugz is a game studio and NFT project which is also maintaining on open source a Unreal SDK for Solana. It comes with lots of NFT focused functionality and has already released the plugin in the Unreal marketplace.
Star Atlas Foundation Kit
The Star Atlas team open sourced some of their SDK stack called Foundation Kit. It is not actively maintained but can be a starting point for your project.
Next.js/React + Anchor
One of the easiest way to build on Solana is using the Web3js JavaScript framework in combination with the Solana Anchor framework. For more complex games, we recommend looking into using a Game Engine like Unity or Unreal though.
The fastest way to set it up a Next.js based game:
npx create-solana-game your-game-name
This will generate a great starting application with wallet-adapter
support,
an Anchor program, a React app, and a Unity client already configured to work
together. A benefit of using Next.js is that you can use the same code in the
backend and in the frontend, speeding up development.
If you are working on a Solana SDK and want to add your preset to the preset you can open a PR here: Solana games preset
Phaser
A fast, free, and fun open source framework for Canvas and WebGL powered browser based games. Phaser is a great way to get started with game development on Solana. The Phaser Solana Platformer Template is a great starting point for your game.
Flutter
Flutter is an open source framework, maintained by Google, for building beautiful, natively compiled, multi-platform applications from a single codebase. The Solana Flutter SDK is maintained by the Espresso Cash team.
Python
Python is an easy to learn programming and widely used language (often used in machine learning applications). The Seahorse framework enables developers to write Solana programs in Python. Seahorse is built on top of the Anchor framework and converts Python code into Anchor based rust code. Seahorse is currently in beta.
Native C#
The original port of Web3js to C#. It comes with a bunch of functionality like transactions, RPC functions and Anchor client code generation.