Hiro

Introduction #

Modern games are built around deep, connected experiences—progression, achievements, rewards, and social play keep players engaged far beyond the core loop. But creating these metagame systems from scratch takes time and resources that could go toward the gameplay itself.

Hiro is a client–server framework built on the open-source Nakama game server, designed to help you implement core metagame systems quickly and reliably. With Hiro, you can integrate features like economies, leaderboards, achievements, and tournaments using simple configuration files and client SDKs for Unity and Unreal, freeing you to focus on the creative side of game design.

Hiro provides a unified foundation for metagame systems such as currencies, inventories, teams, social sharing, and analytics. Each system is fully configurable and versioned for long-term stability, supporting live balancing, backward compatibility, and post-launch upgrades. By decoupling metagame logic from gameplay code, Hiro helps teams ship faster, maintain easily, and evolve their games confidently. No need to rebuild core systems every time.

Hiro systems #

Hiro includes a suite of modular systems that power the metagame layer of your project. Each system provides ready-to-use functionality that you can customize to match your game’s design. There’s no single formula for building a metagame. Instead, Hiro’s flexibility lets you experiment, tune, and evolve your systems over time.

Achievements #

Achievements are structured goals or milestones that reward players for reaching specific objectives, such as defeating a certain number of enemies, collecting rare items, or reaching a level milestone. They create a clear sense of progress and accomplishment that keeps players engaged across sessions. You can configure incremental achievements that track partial progress, as well as recurring ones that reset on a schedule for daily or weekly challenges. Hiro’s Achievements system supports automatic or manual claiming of rewards, allowing designers to fine-tune player pacing and reward cadence.

Meta-game features you can build with Achievements:

• Daily, weekly or monthly tasks
• Quests
• Battle Pass systems

Economy #

The Economy system is the backbone of any sustainable metagame. It manages all aspects of your in-game economy—currencies, stores, ad-based rewards, and donations—using JSON configuration files and server-side logic. You can define both hard and soft currencies, create virtual stores for purchasing items, or integrate rewarded ads that grant bonus currency. By balancing currency sources and sinks, Hiro’s Economy helps you build fair, engaging monetization loops while preventing inflation or imbalance over time. Combined with personalizer, you can easily experiment on your economy balance and provide personalized experience for your players.

Meta-game features you can build with Economy:

• Virtual currency systems (soft and premium)
• Shops and offers (bundles, dynamic pricing)
• Rewarded ads and piggy bank mechanics

Event leaderboards #

Event leaderboards add time-limited competition to your game, encouraging players to engage in recurring events for prestige and rewards. Players compete by scoring points or completing objectives within a fixed window, such as a holiday tournament or special challenge week. You can configure how scores are tracked, how often leaderboards reset, and what types of prizes are awarded to top performers. These competitive events drive community interaction and give players reasons to return regularly, enhancing both retention and replayability.

Meta-game features you can build with Event leaderboards:

• Competitive events (seasonal, PvP, or global)
• Ranked tiers and bracketed rewards
• Time-limited tournaments or score races

Inventory #

The Inventory system manages everything players own—collectibles, consumables, crafting materials, or equipment. It supports stacking, categorization, and time-limited ownership, allowing for systems like rental gear or expiring boosts. You can easily define how items behave, whether they’re permanent, consumable, or tradable, and how they interact with other systems such as the Economy or Rewards modules. This system underpins many common metagame features, from loot drops and crafting to cosmetic customization and gear progression.

Meta-game features you can build with Inventory:

• Collection systems (collectible sets, completion mechanics)
• Gear progression and item enhancement
• Resource management loops (crafting, upgrading, fusing)
• Cosmetic customization and vanity systems

Rewards #

The Rewards system is Hiro’s central mechanism for awarding resources in response to player actions or system triggers. A reward can bundle currencies, items, energy, modifiers, or combinations thereof. Rewards can be delivered immediately, deferred via mailboxes, or split across recipients (player, team, team members).

You define reward types and rules:

• Guaranteed: specific resources that always drop (e.g. “100 gold + 1 gem”)
• Weighted / gacha style: probability-based pools (e.g. chance to get rare item vs common)
• Deferred / mailbox: reward placed in claimable storage (e.g. post-event payouts)
• Modifier buffs: temporary multipliers to future rewards (e.g. “2× coin reward for next hour”)

Rewards integrate deeply across Hiro’s systems:

• Achievements & progression grant rewards on milestones
• Inventory consumption or usage can trigger rewards
• Event Leaderboards distribute prizes to top players or teams
• Economy placements (e.g. rewarded video) use rewards to deliver monetization incentives
• Incentives / social systems award senders and recipients in gifting flows

You can target rewards carefully—send directly to player, to a mailbox, to a team, or to individual team members. Complex flows (e.g. “team wins → team gets trophy + each member gets coins”) are supported via combined reward definitions.

Teams #

Teams enable social play by letting players form groups, clans, or guilds that share progress and goals. Each team can maintain its own stats, inventory, and reward structures, supporting cooperative gameplay and community building. You can design systems such as team challenges, resource pooling, or collective event participation to strengthen player relationships. Hiro’s Teams system includes tools for managing membership, team data, and shared achievements—all essential for games that emphasize collaboration and competition.

Meta-game features you can build with Teams:

• Clan and guild systems (cooperative or competitive)
• Alliance events and shared objectives
• Social progression and collective rewards

List of all Hiro systems #

The table below summarizes Hiro’s core systems and the types of metagame features you can build with them.

Supporting features #

In addition to its core systems, Hiro includes supporting features that enhance your live operations and player personalization strategies.

Analytics #

The Analytics system lets you stream custom events to external tools for deeper insight into player behavior, engagement funnels, and the effectiveness of your LiveOps campaigns. Use these analytics to inform data-driven decisions, optimize new features, and measure retention or monetization impact over time.

Typical use cases include:

• Running A/B tests to evaluate new mechanics or content
• Predicting player churn and improving retention
• Building dashboards to monitor feature performance

Offline support #

The Offline Support capability enables your game to keep delivering rich meta-game experiences—even when players go offline. Using the Unity SDK for Hiro, you can allow players to continue key systems such as achievements, energy, inventory and events using cached data and then seamlessly synchronize when the connection is restored.

Typical use cases include:

• Players complete quests and earn rewards while offline
• Players submit event or leaderboard scores even without immediate connectivity
• Players consume or regenerate energy, including applying modifiers, while offline

Personalizer #

The Personalizer system enables dynamic configuration for each player, based on behavioral data, experimentation results, or segmentation rules. It helps you tailor the player experience—adjusting offers, balance, and rewards in real time—without shipping new client builds.

Typical use cases include:

• Offering personalized in-game deals or challenges
• Dynamically balancing game difficulty
• Running live experiments to test new feature variations

Integrations #

The Integrations system connects Hiro with third-party SDKs and services such as Facebook, AppsFlyer, or Unity Purchasing. It allows you to extend your game’s ecosystem by enabling features like cross-platform linking, analytics, and monetization tracking. Integrations make it easy to combine Hiro’s systems with external tools to support your full live operations stack.

Typical use cases include:

• Linking player accounts across multiple platforms
• Tracking user acquisition and attribution
• Managing in-app purchases or external events

Next steps #

1. Start integrating Hiro into your game by following the installation guide.
2. Explore Hiro’s concepts guides to learn more about each system.
3. Check our client SDKs for Unity and Unreal to start developing your game client.
4. Watch our “Reconstructing Fun with Hiro” series on YouTube to deep dive into implementation

Need help? Get in touch with the Heroic Labs team.