Peaky Blinders: The King's Ransom is an exciting VR adventure in the world of the award-winning TV show, which I worked on as a Unity Engineer for Maze Theory.

Players are tasked with recovering a stolen briefcase by gangster Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy). They will also cross paths with other iconic characters from the world of Peaky Blinders, such as Arthur Shelby (Paul Anderson) and Polly Gray (Ruth Gibson), along with some new original characters.

With large environments, exciting action sequences & shootouts, and exploratory interaction scenes, Peaky Blinders was a complex project, that pushed the limits of what standalone headsets such as the Meta Quest 2 and the PICO 3 were capable of.

As a Unity Engineer, I worked within a large, multi-disciplinary development team led by game director Tim Jones. My contributions to the game were wide ranging, from creating crucial interactive gameplay elements to establishing backend foundational systems.

The first system I tackled was the inventory and quest management "Journal" system which underpinned much of our player progression. It was easily accessible, diegetic and tangible, taking the form of a diary written by our main character and stored at the player's shoulder. Within it, players could access keys and letters, collectibles, and read through the main character's musings about their adventures.

With the scale and level of detail that Peaky Blinders: The King's Ransom strove for, the project required a robust addressables management system, which I helped set up and maintain alongside my colleagues in the programming team. It meshed together with our save & load system to ensure a smooth experience to our players, no matter the platform.

Another notable contribution of mine was the creation, implementation and maintenance of our localization system. This allowed my colleagues in the design team to easily import Gridly databases into the project, search them, and select between 4'713 text entries, each then translated into 9 languages: English, French, German, Italian, Castilian Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Standardised Mandarin, and Traditional Mandarin.

Peaky Blinders: The King's Ransom released in March 2023 on Meta Quest 2, PICO 4, Playstation VR 2 and Steam VR.