Inventory, Chat and Turn-Based Matches: horizOn's Biggest Feature Week

Sooner or later every online game needs the same handful of systems. A place to store what a player owns. A currency that cannot be duplicated by a lucky network hiccup. Achievements that pay out exactly once. A friends list, a chat, maybe a match against someone who plays on their lunch break. Each of these is a small project on its own, and together they can eat months of development time before the actual game gets any better.

This week horizOn took a big step on exactly that list. Server 1.73 and Dashboard 1.111 bring a full set of economy and social features, and the Unity, Godot and Unreal SDKs all got new versions to use them. Here is what shipped between October 22 and October 28.

A Server-Side Economy for Your Game

The new economy features cover the parts of a game where mistakes cost real trust: what players own, what they earn and what they spend.

• Items and inventory. Define an item catalog in the dashboard and let players hold, buy and use items. Item bases are shared, and each instance only stores what makes it different, which keeps inventories compact.
• Player values. Balances such as coins, gems or energy, plus offers that exchange one value for another.
• Achievements. Progress, unlocks and rewards. A reward is delivered through the player inbox, so it is not lost if the game closes at the wrong moment.
• Player statistics. Counters like matches played or enemies defeated, updated atomically and configurable in the dashboard.
• Gift codes with value rewards. A gift code can now grant player values directly, and the server owns the whole redemption.

Why "atomic" matters here

If you build an economy yourself, the hard part is not storing a number. It is what happens when a request fails halfway. The player taps "buy", the coins are deducted, the connection drops and the item never arrives. Or the client retries and the reward is paid twice. Fixing that after launch means support tickets, manual refunds and players who no longer believe the numbers on their screen.

In horizOn, purchases, reward claims and value changes either complete fully or not at all. The SDKs keep the original intent of an action, so a retry after a lost connection finishes the same operation instead of starting a new one.

Best practices for your first economy

1. Start with one currency and a handful of items. A small catalog is easier to balance and easier to test.
2. Never trust the client with balances. Let the server change values and treat the client as a display.
3. Test the failure path on purpose. Kill the game during a purchase and check that the result is either complete or untouched.
4. Use the dashboard workbench. You can inspect a player's values, items and achievements in one connected player record when someone reports a problem.

Friends, Groups, Chat and Turn-Based Matches

The social side arrived in the same release.

• Friends. Friend requests, relationships and a public player lookup, for example via friend codes.
• Groups. Guilds, clans or teams with membership and administration.
• Chat. Hosted chat with message receipts. History is kept on the player's device, and the dashboard includes a moderation view, so you can step in when a conversation goes wrong.
• Matches. Asynchronous, turn-based matches. Players take their turn, close the game and come back later. Ranked runs can be recovered after an interruption.

Turn-based play fits a huge range of games: card and board games, puzzle duels, strategy titles and anything people play a few minutes at a time. The communication runs over a WebSocket connection, and players get a notice when it is their turn.

Trade, Gift and Message Your Players

Three more features connect players with each other and with you.

• Marketplace. Players can list and trade items. Items are held safely during a trade and returned if it does not go through. The earlier limit on receipts per player has been removed.
• Player inbox. Broadcast notices to all players or deliver rewards that players claim themselves. The dashboard has a protected broadcast view and support tools.
• Shared objects. Data that several players work on together, with revision checks so two changes at the same time do not overwrite each other.

New Versions for Unity, Godot and Unreal

All three engine SDKs support the new features:

• Unity SDK 1.12 adds managers for items, player values, achievements, friends, groups, chat, matches, marketplace, inbox and shared objects, with samples you can run right away.
• Godot SDK 1.11 adds the same set in GDScript, including session-safe managers and example scenes.
• Unreal SDK 1.10 brings typed C++ clients and Blueprint nodes. Follow-up releases up to 1.10.3 make the plugin load on UE 5.6 and newer without the incompatible-plugin prompt, save Import Config to DefaultGame.ini and fix packaging for standalone builds.

If you work with an AI coding assistant, MCP Server 1.9 exposes the new features as tools, from inventory and matches to groups, inbox and chat moderation. Your assistant can look up how a feature works instead of guessing.

Move a Project to Your Own Server

Some teams start on horizOn Cloud and later want to run their backend themselves. That move just got much simpler. Dashboard 1.114 and Server 1.75 let you download a project's content as one file, and Simple Server 1.6 imports it.

Simple Server 1.5 also gained the new features this week, with SQLite and MySQL support for items, player values, achievements, statistics, friends, groups, matches, marketplace, inbox and shared objects. Chat stays reserved for horizOn Cloud.

Smaller Improvements

• Guest sign-in. The default limit for anonymous sign-ins is now 120 per IP and project, and the limit can be configured.
• Performance and stability. Server 1.75 uses less database and backend CPU per request, and reads and transactions recover cleanly after a database failover.
• Pricing page. The full plan comparison is easier to read and can be reached from the home page without an account.
• Game jams. A new partner page for game jams sits in the About group of the top navigation.

If you missed last week's update, the roundup on Free plan email and the new signup covers it.

Get Updates Faster on Discord

This post sums up the week. If you want to hear about releases the moment they ship, join the horizOn Discord server. New versions show up there live, often days before they reach this weekly roundup, and it is the quickest way to ask us questions or tell us what you need next.

Pick one of the new features, try it in a test project and tell us how it went. You can reply on Discord or open an issue on GitHub. The full list of changes is on the horizOn changelog.