Introduction
More than just another API wrapper, it's a powerful Steamworks integration for Unity & Unreal. Easy-to-use editor tools, proven systems, impeccable support, a rich knowledge base & friendly community
Last updated
More than just another API wrapper, it's a powerful Steamworks integration for Unity & Unreal. Easy-to-use editor tools, proven systems, impeccable support, a rich knowledge base & friendly community
Last updated
Becoming a sponsor of Heathen on GitHub or Patreon is the best way to support us and enable us to deliver more articles, videos, tools, examples, support, and just more! It's also the best way to buy/license all of Heathen's Toolkits, assets and services.
Heathen's Toolkit is a robust kit of editor tools and extensions, proven game systems and extensive guides and articles that cover not just every function & feature of the plugin but go beyond into guides & articles on every facet of being a Steam Developer and Game Developer in general. This is all supported by our team of passionate engineers & our community of thousands of game developers who have shipped hundreds of games on Steam.
Even if you never use our tools this Knowledge Base is the best resource for any game developer planning to ship on Steam.
We cover every aspect not just of the Steamworks SDK but the Steam platform itself including but not limited to setting up your store page, working with the community hub, understanding the discovery queue and of course a full breakdown of every feature of the Steamworks SDK.
No half measures, no black magic, every feature of Steam API is available as defined by Valve with no shortcuts or skipped features and they are all fully supported by our easy-to-use and robust tools with full source code included.
Whether you are a veteran Steam developer looking to save time and reduce maintenance costs or a hobbyist hoping to demystify the powerful but often cryptic Steamworks SDK, Heathen has you fully covered on Unreal and Unity with Godot support a work in progress.
More than just another API wrapper means just that, we go above and beyond simply exposing the Steamworks SDK endpoints to you in code and scripting interfaces (C#, Blueprints, etc.). Heathen's Toolkit for Steamworks SDK is a toolkit of proven, trusted, efficient and well documented and supported systems, frameworks, widgets, prefabs, tools, guides, approaches and more.
We of course do expose every endpoint, enumerator and interface in code (C#, Blueprints, etc.). So we are also a wrapper that makes the Steamworks SDK feel native to the engine you choose and in the way you choose to work with that engine.
Then we build on top of that low-level one-to-one engine-specific wrap making it trivial to connect Steam-centric concepts to your Engine's native concepts e.g. textures, event systems, data type limitations, etc.
Then we build on top of that with systems, widgets, prefabs and templates that work with your engine's concepts to address common use cases and boilerplate needs in a manner appropriate for the engine you are working on. Initialization, Save Game, Data Management, etc. and we enable networking solutions common to your engine of choice to do the same e.g. NetCode, FishNet, Mirror, NetDrivers, etc.
Trusted by thousands of developers we have been hard at work on this tool for more than a decade. The Steam Curator link above is just a few of the works our community have published covering many genres and demonstrating a wide range of examples from small passion projects to major commercial products.
Toolkit for Steamworks SDK is a reliable, proven solution to help you Do More with your game's on Steam.
Our tools are built in layers from powerful APIs and Frameworks up to code-free solutions. No matter your need, skill level or discipline our tools can help you Do More!
Whether you're new to Steam, or game development in general or maybe a seasoned veteran well capable with the Steam APIs, Heathen’s Steamworks can greatly accelerate your project and help you produce a more robust product that better leverages the services offered by Valve.
In Unity Heathen's Toolkit for Steamworks SDK is built on top of Steamworks.NET. The Steamworks.NET project is designed to be a direct 1 to 1 wrapper around Valve's Steam API wrapping the native C and C++ interfaces up in a C# plugin.
Steamworks.NET is authored by Riley Labrecque be sure to check out and support his great work! You can pop over to his sponsor page if you are interested.
Steamworks.NET gives the best access to Valve's APIs and does so true to the original so that the original documentation and decades of community guidance are still applicable.
The drawback to Steamworks.NET is that it is true to the original API using programming styles and approaches foreign to most game developers and very clunky at best to use in Unity or Godot scripting.
Heathen has extended every relevant interface in Steamworks.NET delivering a simpler more robust tool set. Every drop of power of the native Steam API / Steamworks API is still available to you should you have the need.
Heathen's Steamworks does not replace Steamworks.NET - it builds on top of it and provides you with a set of battle-tested and developer-approved tools and systems written with Unity in mind.
Facepunch is another C# wrapper just like Steamworks.NET however, unlike Steamworks.NET it does not attempt to remain true to the original API as a result the existing community and documentation around Steamworks are less applicable.
Facepunch's stated goal is to make a C#-focused wrapper that exploits/leverages the benefits of C#. This makes most of the code you would need to write shorter / more C# programmer-friendly. It however also makes it alien to Valve's documents and its wider community and while Unity uses C# as its main scripting language it does so in a "Unity" way for example C# would use event delegates, in Unity we use UnityEvents.
whoHeathen does similar in that we are here to make the Steam API more friendly to a specific audience, only we are Unity-centric not just C# centric. We have wrapped the complexities of Steamworks.NET making it quick and easy to integrate for C# programmers, Unity-specific programmers, Unity designers and hobbyists who prefer to use tools like Bolt or work through inspectors to get the job done. We chose to build on top of Steamworks.NET so that the dev that wants/needs to can still leverage the decades of community guidance on the source API only needing to convert C/C++ to C#.
Because we are built on top of Steamworks.NET which is itself a true-to-form wrapper around the native Steam APIs many tools, assets, etc. built for Steamworks.NET or Valve's original Steam API simply work, that is not the case for Facepunch which often requires its own flavour of a tool to work.
Put bluntly Online Subsystem Steam is an incomplete solution. It does not cover the full Steam API and is limited to a handful of modules, what it does cover it only partially covers.
You can see a more line-by-line breakdown of Heathen vs Online Subsystem Steam in our Unreal article.
Heathen's Toolkit is a complete integration of every aspect of Valve's Steamworks with the engine. It goes well beyond a simple API wrapper and provides you with ready-made and proven tools. The full Steam API is exposed to you in both C++ and Blueprint Functions, we also provide you with a set of common-use UI Widgets and Unreal-centric tools like our Steam Remote Storage Save Game base class, Steam Game Instance and more.
Steam Core is a plugin available from the Unreal Marketplace and is "another Steam API wrapper". It provides more coverage than you get with Epic's own Online Subsystem Steam but doesn't cover the full Steam API. It also (appears) to make improper use of Steam API in a few key areas for example its approach to Steam Remote Storage (aka Steam Cloud) is to save the game to the disk using Unreal's Save Game and then read that file from the disk to save it to Steam Remote Storage ... this is exactly what Valve says you shouldn't do as you will end up with sync issues, it also doubles the disk space the save uses since Steam Remote Storage also writes the file to disk before syncing to Valve's backend.
The major difference between Heathen and frankly any other option is that Heathen has been doing this for over a decade, we have supported thousands of developers shipping hundreds of games on Steam. Our tools are well-designed and adhere to Valve's and the engine's best practices, our tools are more than just a Steam API wrapper, they let you leverage our extensive experience with the Steam API and Steam platform.
Learn More Perpetual Site License This means your entire team can work under the 1 license and the license is yours to keep forever.
Monthly Purchase, Instant Update Updates happen in real-time, you have access to our source code while you are subscribed so updates are of course instant.
Escalated Support Get escalated support, issue and feedback tracking and of course our standard live community support.
All Tools You get instant access to all of Heathen's tools for all engines.
FAB (All coming-soon), Marketplace (Unreal), Asset Store (Unity) Perpetual Per-User License Each store defines its own "standard license" but all use a per-user model. You are meant to buy 1 for each person on the project.
Yearly Purchase, Quarterly Updates You are purchasing that year's quarterly updates and hotfixes. The next major update will be available to you at an 80% discount off the base price. The stores are refreshed quarterly from GitHub. in addition to any hotfixes addressing breaking changes.
Single Tool Each purchase is for a single tool, Unity Asset Store is for ONLY Unity while FAB supports both Unity and Unreal.
Depreciation Unity Asset Store and FAB use a Major Version Update system, each year on or about 1st November a new Major is released and the old one is deprecated. You can of course keep using older versions without issue, we DO NOT remove access to anything you own and we DO NOT revoke your licenses EVER.
Foundation
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