Karan
Nandkar

Server-authoritative design, lag compensation, deterministic state sync. Shipped across BullBash and Tankz N Glory.

For BullBash, I designed a server-authoritative loop where all game state lived server-side and clients sent only intent. Lag compensation used a rolling history buffer to rewind and re-evaluate hit events — the same pattern used in Counter-Strike. For Tankz N Glory I extended this to 4v4 with per-entity interest management to reduce unnecessary sync traffic.

Modular player, progression, ability, and inventory systems designed for live-content expansion.

In EcoRun, I separated the player controller, progression manager, and spawner into decoupled modules connected through scriptable-object event channels. This let designers add new content drops without touching code. In Yaaro Ki Rasoi, I used a component-based interaction system where each kitchen object registered its own interactable contract — scaling cleanly to hundreds of objects.

UE5 Tick reduction, widget optimization, mobile profiling, pooling systems. Restored framerate on shipped UE5 mobile title.

On Yaaro Ki Rasoi (UE5 mobile), I used Unreal Insights and a stat overlay to trace the frame budget and found two culprits: hundreds of actors ticking every frame and world-space UI widgets re-rendering without dirty-checking. I disabled tick on idle actors, batched widget updates, and introduced a custom object-pool for FX — recovering 18–22ms per frame on a mid-range Android device.

PlayFab integration, IAP, ads, analytics pipelines. 4 years at Loco shipping live mobile titles.

At Loco I owned the full live-ops integration layer: PlayFab player data, economy, and matchmaking; MoPub/AdMob mediation; and a custom analytics pipeline routing events to BigQuery for the data team. I also built an A/B test harness in Unity that read experiment assignments from PlayFab flags — no app update required to flip feature variants.

Production-grade work across Unity (C#) and Unreal Engine 5 (C++/Blueprints).

Most engineers specialise in one engine. I have shipped to production in both: Unity C# at Tap Cube, Loco, and P99SOFT; Unreal Engine 5 C++ and Blueprints at P99SOFT for Yaaro Ki Rasoi. The mental model transfers — but the tooling, memory model, and profiling workflows are different enough that genuine dual-engine fluency takes years to build.

Owned crash-rate reduction and runtime stability across live mobile titles at Loco.

At Loco I was the go-to engineer for production fires. I built a triage workflow using Firebase Crashlytics and logcat symbolication, correlating spikes to specific build deltas. Key fixes included eliminating null-ref chains in async callback trees, hardening state machines against unexpected server payloads, and adding defensive guards around ad-network SDK calls that were the source of ~30% of non-fatal errors.