The January sun in Hyderabad was forgiving, bathing the glass façade of the Cyber Towers in HITEC City with a warm, golden glow. On the 14th floor of a newly constructed high-rise adjacent to the main tech hub, the air smelled of fresh paint, carpet glue, and the electric hum of ambition.
This was Nexus Interactive.
To the outside world, Siddanth Deva was resting his back after a grueling cricket season. To the twenty hand-picked engineers and designers sitting in the conference room, he was the Boss.
The office was raw. Cables hung from the ceiling where the server racks were being installed. The "breakout zone" currently consisted of a few beanbags and a half-assembled foosball table. But the view was spectacular—the sprawling tech jungle of Hyderabad, a city on the verge of a digital explosion.
Siddanth stood at the head of the conference table. He wore a simple black t-shirt and jeans, a stark contrast to the Indian team jersey the world was used to seeing him in.
Next to him stood Arjun, dressed in a crisp shirt, holding a tablet. He looked every bit the CFO of a budding empire.
Around the table sat the core team.
Karthik, the Lead Engineer—a spectacled genius poached from a top IT firm in Bangalore.
Ananya, the Creative Director—an artist with purple-streaked hair who had worked on indie games.
Rohan, the UI/UX Lead—a minimalist who hated clutter.
And about fifteen other coders and artists, all looking at the 19-year-old cricketer with a mix of awe and skepticism. They knew he had money. They knew he was famous. But did he know code?
The Cash Cow: "Project Sugar"
"Welcome to Nexus," Siddanth began, his voice calm but authoritative. "You are here because you are the best. And you are here because you are bored of writing banking software and e-commerce backends. You want to build worlds."
He tapped the whiteboard behind him.
"We have two mandates. Phase One is the engine. Phase Two is the revolution."
He picked up a marker. He drew a grid.
"Phase One: Project Sugar."
"It's a match-three puzzle game," Siddanth said. "Simple. Colorful. Addictive."
Karthik raised an eyebrow. "Like Bejeweled? That's been done, Sir. It's 2010. The market is flooded with clones."
"Not like this," Siddanth corrected. "We aren't making a game for gamers. We are making a game for everyone. Your mom. The uncle on the train. The college student waiting for a bus."
He drew a candy shape.
"The theme is Candy. Everyone loves sugar. It's visceral. The sound effects need to be crunchy. When you crush a candy, it shouldn't just disappear; it should feel satisfying. Like popping bubble wrap."
He turned to Ananya. "I want the art style to be glossy. Hyper-realistic but stylized. Vibrant reds, yellows, blues. It needs to look delicious."
Then, he turned to Arjun. "And the monetization. It's 'Freemium'. The game is free. But lives? They cost money. Or time. You get 5 lives. You lose them, you wait 30 minutes. Or... you pay $0.99. Or you ask a Facebook friend."
Arjun nodded, typing notes. "Social integration. Viral loops. We use the Facebook API to make players market the game for us."
"Exactly," Siddanth said. "This game is our war chest. It will generate the cash flow we need for the real dream. I want a prototype in two weeks. A beta in two months. We launch on Facebook first, then iOS and Android as soon as the app stores mature."
The room nodded. It made sense. It was a safe, commercial bet.
"Okay," Karthik said. "Match-three logic is simple. We can churn that out. What's Phase Two?"
Siddanth wiped the board. The smile on his face shifted. It wasn't the polite smile of a businessman anymore.
"Phase Two," he said softly, "is Project Battlegrounds."
The Revolution: "Project Battlegrounds"
Siddanth drew a large, rough island shape on the board. He marked a few spots: Military Base, School, Power Plant.
"Imagine an island," Siddanth began, pacing the room. "8km by 8km. Abandoned. Soviet-era aesthetic. Rusting fences. Overgrown grass. Rainy weather."
He looked at the team.
"Now, imagine dropping 100 players onto that island. Empty-handed. No guns. No armor. Just the clothes on their back."
The room went silent.
"100 players?" Karthik asked, skepticism creeping back in. "Concurrently? On one server?"
"Yes," Siddanth said. "They jump out of a plane. They parachute down. They have to scavenge for weapons. An AK-47 in a bathroom. A frying pan in a kitchen. A sniper rifle in a watchtower."
"And then?" Ananya asked, intrigued.
"Then they kill each other," Siddanth said. "Last man standing wins. One winner. 99 losers."
"It's a Deathmatch," Rohan suggested.
"No," Siddanth stopped him. "Deathmatch is about respawning. You die, you come back, you shoot again. In this game... Death is final. You die, you are back to the lobby. You lose everything."
He paused to let that sink in.
"The tension," Siddanth whispered. "Imagine hiding in a bathroom, hearing footsteps outside. You have a shotgun with two shells. You know if you miss, game over. Your heart is pounding. That is what we are selling. Adrenaline."
He drew a large circle around the island. Then a smaller one inside it.
"But we can't have them camping forever. So, we introduce 'The Blue Zone'. An electrical field that shrinks every few minutes. If you are outside the circle, you take damage. It forces players together. It forces conflict."
"The Circle..." Karthik muttered. "It forces the pace. Brilliant."
"This," Siddanth tapped the board, "is PUBG. PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. But we will call it 'Battlegrounds' for now. I want realistic ballistics. Bullet drop. Recoil. None of that arcade laser-gun nonsense. If you shoot a sniper from 500 meters, you have to aim above the head."
---
The creative team looked excited. The engineers looked terrified.
Karthik took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.
"Deva... sir," Karthik started respectfully but firmly. "I get the vision. It sounds amazing. But technically? In 2010? It's a nightmare."
"Explain," Siddanth challenged, leaning against the table.
"Networking," Karthik listed on his fingers. "Syncing 100 players with complex physics—bullet trajectories, vehicle physics, door states—across the internet. The latency will be unplayable. You'll have rubber-banding everywhere. Even Call of Duty only does 12 or 16 players. Battlefield does 64, but they have massive budgets and proprietary engines. We are a startup."
"Also," another engineer piped up, "Rendering. An 8km map with no loading screens? The draw distance alone will melt the average GPU. Most people are running dual-cores with 2GB RAM."
Arjun looked at Siddanth. This was the hurdle. Money couldn't buy physics.
Siddanth walked over to Karthik's laptop.
"You are thinking like a traditional developer," Siddanth said, his voice changing tone. It became technical. Precise. "You are trying to sync everything to everyone."
(A/N: With the Tower of Babel skill, he can learn any language easily.)
He grabbed a marker and started writing code snippets on the whiteboard.
if (distance_to_player > 1000m) { update_rate = 1Hz; } else { update_rate = 60Hz; }
"Network Level of Detail (LOD)," Siddanth explained, scribbling furiously. "We don't send updates about Player A to Player B if they are 5 kilometers apart. We cull the network traffic based on proximity. The server knows where everyone is, but the client only receives data for the immediate 1km radius."
Karthik leaned forward, squinting at the board.
"That... reduces the packet size by 90%," he whispered.
"Exactly," Siddanth continued. "And for the rendering? We use 'World Origin Re-centering' to prevent floating-point errors on large maps. We use aggressive occlusion culling. If a building blocks the view, we don't render the trees behind it."
Siddanth wrote out a complex algorithm for Client-Side Prediction.
"We trust the client for movement to make it feel responsive, but the server validates the hit detection to prevent cheating. 'Rewind Time' lag compensation. If I shoot you, the server looks back at where you were 50ms ago to check the hit."
He put the marker down.
"We build it on Unreal Engine 3," Siddanth declared. "It has the source code access we need. We modify the net-code ourselves."
The room was dead silent.
Karthik looked at the whiteboard. Then he looked at Siddanth.
"You..." Karthik stammered. "You're a cricketer. You play for India. When did you learn Netcode architecture?"
Siddanth shrugged, returning to his charming persona.
"I read a lot on flights," he winked. "And I have good intuition."
He looked at the team.
"The hardware is getting better. By the time we release the Alpha in late 2010 or early 2011, quad-cores will be standard. We build for the future, not for today."
The Roadmap
"Here is the timeline," Siddanth said, turning to Arjun.
"Project Sugar (Candy Crush):"
Team: Ananya (Art), Rohan (UI), and 5 Juniors.
Deadline: Prototype in 15 days. Soft launch in 3 months.
Target: Facebook Web. (Mobile later).
"Project Battlegrounds (PUBG):"
Team: Karthik (Lead), Me, and the Senior Engineers.
Deadline: Engine modification - 2 months. Map Design - 4 months. Alpha Playtest - December 2010.
Target: PC Exclusive first, then smartphones.
"Smartphones?" Rohan asked. "I don't think the game can be run on smartphones."
"Phones aren't ready for Battlegrounds yet," Siddanth said. "The touch controls, the processing power... it's not there. We build the brand on PC. We make it the biggest game in the world on Steam (or direct download). When the phones catch up—maybe in 2013 or 2014—we port it. And we will call it PUBG Mobile. And that... that will be the monster."
He looked at Arjun.
"Arjun, I need servers. Amazon AWS is starting to get big. Look into cloud scaling. We don't want to buy physical racks if we can scale dynamically."
Arjun nodded, writing furiously. "Cloud computing. AWS. Got it. I'll set up a meeting with Amazon."
---
Siddanth walked to the center of the room.
"One last thing," he said.
"We are not a corporate sweatshop. I don't care if you come in at 11 AM or work in your pajamas. I care about the product."
He pointed to the breakout zone.
"Arjun, get a PS3. Get an Xbox 360. Get a fridge full of Red Bull and Thums Up. If you guys are stuck on a bug, stop working. Play games. clear your head."
The engineers exchanged smiles. This was the dream workplace.
"But," Siddanth's voice hardened slightly. "I want perfection. No game-breaking bugs. No lazy design. We are competing with EA, Ubisoft, and Zynga. We are going to beat them."
He looked at Ananya. "The 'Candy' art... make it pop. I want people to feel hungry when they look at the screen."
He looked at Karthik. "The 'Battlegrounds' gunplay... make it punchy. I want the AKM to kick like a mule."
"We can do this," Karthik said, his skepticism replaced by adrenaline. "The network culling idea... it's genius. We can actually pull off 100 players."
---
The meeting wrapped up. The room buzzed with energy as the teams broke off into clusters, already sketching UI concepts on notepads and discussing server architecture.
Siddanth and Arjun walked into the private cabin at the corner—Deva's office.
Siddanth collapsed into the ergonomic chair.
"That went well," he exhaled.
"Well?" Arjun laughed. "You terrified them. And then you charmed them. You literally taught a Senior Systems Architect how to write netcode. How do you know that stuff, Sid? Seriously."
Siddanth tapped his head. "I told you, Arri. My brain is... different these days. I see patterns."
Arjun poured two glasses of water.
"So, Candy Crush pays the bills. PUBG builds the empire."
"Exactly," Siddanth said. "Candy Crush will make millions. PUBG will make billions. But we have to be fast. There are others out there. DayZ mod will come soon. Minecraft is growing. We need to capture the 'Survival' market before it explodes."
"We will," Arjun assured him. "I've hired a good HR team. We are scaling up. By the time you come back from the South Africa matches, we'll have the Candy prototype ready."
Siddanth looked out the window. The sun was setting over Hyderabad.
"Rest for the Bangladesh Tests," Siddanth mused. "The world thinks I'm sleeping. Let them think that."
He stood up.
"I have to go to the site in Shamshabad. Check on the house."
"Go," Arjun said. "I'll handle the nerds."
Siddanth walked out of the office.
He walked past the rows of desks.
Karthik was already typing code, two monitors glowing in front of him.
Ananya was sketching a glossy, red jellybean on her Wacom tablet.
The revolution had begun.
Siddanth stepped into the elevator.
The cricket field was his battlefield.
But this office? This was his laboratory.
And he was just getting started.