Rocket Flair Studios is best known for its immersive PC game Dynasty of the Sands, an ancient Egyptian city-building game.
Belfast-based games development start-up Rocket Flair Studios is creating 14 new jobs in areas including full-stack and front-end development, lighting and animation engineering, as well as QA.
Invest NI has offered the company £98,000 in support towards the creation of the roles – eight of which are already in place.
The company announced its hiring plan following the closure of a multimillion-pound deal with an unnamed global games developer. As well as taking on new staff, the start-up will invest £700,000 in its operation to fulfil its contract with the games developer.
Rocket Flair Studios was established in Belfast in 2017. It focuses on using immersive technologies such as AR and VR to create specialist city-builder games for PC. It developed Dynasty of the Sands, a mythical ancient Egypt city-builder game.
“We are delighted that our innovative products have led us to secure a multimillion-pound contract with a prominent global games developer,” said the start-up’s managing director, James Bradley.
“This is a huge step forward for us, especially as 94pc of the sales from the project will be in markets outside Northern Ireland. This will bolster our reputation globally.”
Bradley added that the company approached Invest NI in 2020 when the start-up was still a team of six people. He said the agency’s support had helped Rocket Flair Studios to triple its workforce, giving it “the capacity and specialist expertise to secure and deliver this contract”.
“We now hope to make our plans to create a centre of expertise for strategy-based PC games in Northern Ireland a reality,” he added.
Susan O’Kane, Invest NI’s eastern regional manager, said that the gaming start-up “really understands the global gaming industry and has created a niche with Dynasty of the Sands, which it has received worldwide recognition for”, and that securing a multimillion-pound contract at such an early stage in its business is a “significant achievement”.
She added that the Invest NI team is continuing to work closely with Bradley and Rocket Flair Studios to “help deliver a strategic plan for the company to progress at pace and scale”.
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