Nikhil Bhatia

Game Developer at Lantern Beetle Games | Gameplay systems, small puzzles, increasingly large board-game prototypes

I’m a game developer at Lantern Beetle Games, a small Bengaluru studio where I work on gameplay systems and the bits of UI that make rules feel obvious. I like building puzzles that make someone pause, try something slightly ridiculous, and feel clever when it works. Outside work, I make board-game prototypes out of cereal boxes and spend a surprising amount of time falling off the same climbing route. Usually quiet for the first ten minutes; considerably less quiet if you ask why a game mechanic works.

Build gameplay systems and UI for a small team making puzzle and turn-based games in Godot. Work across prototyping, save systems, controller support, and playtest fixes. Recently reworked our tutorial so players learn the core mechanic by using it rather than reading three screens of instructions.

Implemented level interactions, menus, and progression features for mobile puzzle games. Built internal tools for checking level data and reproducing bugs. Learned to treat a confused playtester as useful evidence, not someone who had failed to appreciate my very elegant code.

Godot, GDScript, C#, Gameplay Programming, Game Prototyping, UI Implementation, Turn-Based Systems, Playtesting, Git, Board Game Design

English, Hindi, Kannada (conversational)

We removed a tutorial panel this week. Then another. The first level now gives players one movable piece, one obstacle, and room to make a harmless mistake. In our next playtest, people understood the mechanic faster and asked fewer questions. My favourite comment was: “Oh, I figured it out.” Technically we arranged for that to happen, but that little feeling of ownership is the whole point. Fewer words on screen, considerably more work behind it.

My bus-route board-game prototype survived another Sunday playtest. The scoring system did not. Two friends independently found that ignoring passengers and hoarding interchange tokens was the best strategy. Excellent news for them, slightly awkward news for a game supposedly about getting people home. I’m changing one incentive before the next session, not adding four new rules. Posting this mostly so I can’t quietly add four new rules.

A small debugging habit that has saved me a lot of time: record the input sequence, not just the final broken state. “The piece disappeared” sent me looking in six places. “Undo, rotate, undo, then restart” gave me a reproducible bug in two minutes. We’ve added a lightweight action log to our internal builds at Lantern Beetle Games. Not glamorous work, but neither is spending an afternoon trying to annoy a menu into breaking again.