AN AUDIENCE WITH... HENRIQUE OLIFIERS

Henrique Olifiers is busy. The studio he co-founded, Bossa, has just announced its new project, a sweeping co-op action adventure he hopes will keeps his design team occupied for the next two decades. On the face of it, Lost Skies feels like a departure for Bossa in that it doesn’t seem to have much in common with the games that brought it most notice, including the Surgeon Simulator series, I Am Bread and I Am Fish. But that would be to ignore Worlds Adrift, the massively multiplayer sandbox game powered by SpatialOS that launched into Early Access in 2017 and ran aground two years later. Lost Skies exists in the same universe as Worlds Adrift, which comes as no surprise when you factor in the new game’s customisable airships, its grapple-based traversal, and the clusters of floating islands it invites you to discover and explore.
In preparing to make a big bet on Lost Skies, last year Bossa sold the rights to its most commercially successful works to American publisher TinyBuild in a deal that involved an upfront payment of $3m. Also keeping Olifiers occupied is the ZX Spectrum Next project, for which he’s been the public face since the original Kickstarter in 2017. There seems little point asking what he does in his spare time, since there can’t be much of it, so we start by trying to pare things down.
There are lots of things on your CV, including art, coding, editorial and management – what is the one thing you feel you do better than all of the others? 
I would say organising people around projects and dreams. It’s what I have been successful at the most in my life. I started out as a bedroom developer, as many people of my age did, but I lived in a third world country where I couldn’t make a living out of making games. I got into computer graphics with a Commodore Amiga, and after that I had the opportunity during my years in uni to work in the gaming press, with [Brazilian sites] GamesMania and then LagZero and FinalBoss. And I did super well there, but my heart was always in game development and always in creating things. And that’s what led me to the UK eventually.
How important do you think the breadth of your hands-on experience has been in terms of your overall success in the game industry? 
The best professionals I’ve ever worked with in the games industry are people who are multi-talented in one way or another, and aren’t absolute specialists. Valve has a good term for this: T-shaped people – people who are very good at their specific niche, but who also understand very well what other people do. A reflection of this, especially at Bossa, is my insistence that we hold regular game jams. In a good year, we will run one every month because it gives everyone the opportunity to be side by side with people from areas that they wouldn’t normally work with, or even perform different roles themselves – like having a game designer composing music, etc. You will find me in the credits of I Am Bread as the sound effects guy, just because I was the only one really willing to break cutlery and plates at home and record all the chaos [laughs]. I love the craft, and anything that I can do, I do. But I’m nowhere near as good a coder as anyone in my team, and nowhere near as good an artist as anyone in my team. I think that the only claim to fame I have is to be able to rally people behind a big objective and set that in motion.
In selling the rights to Bossa’s most famous games, you’re discarding the biggest successes you’ve had to date and doubling down instead on a style of game that has been a lot more challenging for you in the past. Why would you do it that way around? 
It’s a good question, and one that I had to answer many times inside the studio as well, because team members would ask the same thing. We decided two years ago that the most interesting space for us in games is co-op PvE – things that I can play with my friends, against an enemy that is different from us. That’s a very broad definition, and anything from Valheim to Left 4 Dead would fit into that category. We also had a lot of ideas and passion for PvP, but PvP nowadays is so much more competitive, and from a development and production point of view it felt that we’d be best positioned for PvE.
We look at games in this space that we love – Deep Rock Galactic, Valheim, and things like that – and we always start from the point of: is there anything here that we could have possibly done differently that could make it better? When we looked at things like Apex Legends, and battle royales such as PUBG and Fortnite, I said, “I don’t know where we would take this”. So PvE felt like the right concept for us, and we committed to it.
The main reason we committed to it is the creative process that made Bossa a success, which is that we start with game jams. We create around 100 prototypes every year, of which probably three go for validation, with one of them becoming a development product. The results we’ve generated this way have been very different from one another. They’re very disparate, which means that every time we start a new game, we have to start from scratch in every sense of production – we cannot reuse technology, and we cannot reuse the learnings from the community. There’s nothing I can take from I Am Bread into Worlds Adrift, and nothing from Worlds Adrift into Surgeon 2 – we’re always starting from scratch. And that, for a team of our size, became a hindrance. It started to hold us back.
The goal for Bossa in the next five years is to become one of the best, if not the best, co-op PvE multiplayer company in the world. We might fail at that, of course, but that’s what we’re setting out to achieve. And we can only do that if we build upon each one of our titles, time and time again. From the outside, it looks like a risk – “Oh, you guys should just keep doing what you’ve been doing” – but continuing in that way would actually be a larger risk, because we could not improve ourselves over time in terms of production efficiencies.
How do you make sure that everyone at the studio comes along for the ride? Presumably some staff joined Bossa in order to make more games like Surgeon Simulator, for example, and weren’t necessarily coming in to work on a big-scale PvE project such as Lost Skies.
You would think that, but the core team that is developing Lost Skies is actually the same team that came up with Surgeon Simulator. I find it surprising myself, because we have people from all walks of life working here; we have people who’ve worked with animals for a long time, for instance, and you might expect them to be the ones behind Lost Skies, but that’s not the case.
You talked about creating 100 playable prototypes every year – what happens to the 99 ideas that don’t move into production?
They go into what we call the freezer, which is basically a repository. Sometimes we take something out of it, but most of the time we use it to show new Bossa employees what we have been through before. In this repository you can see screenshots alongside descriptions, and you can download and play the things we’ve made. A game we did for Apple Arcade called Hogwash came from a prototype that we had in the freezer. It’s helpful in various ways – if someone says that they’re thinking of trying a certain mechanic, we might have a prototype that takes a similar approach, so they can check it out from the freezer. That then enables them to either come to terms with the fact that the idea maybe wasn’t so good, or it enables them to make the idea better than they were originally planning.
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With the TinyBuild deal, how did you arrive at that $3m number? What was the negotiation process? 
There were a couple of elements at play. The first one was that I didn’t want the IPs to lose relevance and go stale. That was the overriding requirement. I’m a fan of Command & Conquer and Syndicate, for example – two big games that are nowhere to be found today. Even when they tried to be reignite those games, decades after their debuts, they didn’t stick, for various reasons – because so much time had passed, and the original people were no longer involved, and so on. So that was my main concern. The second concern was the lack of a dedicated team at Bossa to maintain these projects. Bossa is a relatively small studio, with around 75 people, and I have most of them working on Lost Skies, so every time something breaks on another game, I have to take someone from Lost Skies to fix it.
Going back to the core of the question, there are many ways that these deals are made, but in our case it was very simple math: we look at what revenue we expected these IPs to return over the next two or three years if we didn’t touch them at all – that gives us the base value, and of course we also have backends and things like that. But what also helped is that we had an established relationship with TinyBuild – they picked up one of our game jam ideas, Pigeon Simulator, and are taking it forward rather than us handling it. It’s one of those rare situations where you find someone who can creatively understand what you wanted to do, and you have trust that they can take it forward. That was the rationale, but we could have done the deal in ten different ways.
What were your biggest takeaways from making Worlds Adrift – and then ultimately pulling the plug on it earlier than you would have liked?
There were several takeaways – positive and negatives. The positives included how much the community loved the game – and still love it to this day. Even the criticism it received was because they loved the game and we took it away from them. Even that, in a way, I consider to be a positive. From a design perspective, there were lots of positive learnings as well, particularly regarding scope, and how much we stretched ourselves beyond our capabilities. It was too ambitious for a prototype. In practical terms, it helped us to realise that we should be far more self-reliant in terms of the tools, methodologies and technologies that we employ. With Surgeon Simulator, which we released soon after Worlds Adrift, you could see that everything was made inside Bossa, including the entire technology stack.
CV
Henrique Olifiers started out creating games from his bedroom in 1980s Brazil, and stepped up a gear by getting involved in the Commodore Amiga demoscene as he taught himself 3D modelling. Following a stint working in TV production and experience running prominent Brazilian gaming sites LagZero and FinalBoss, he joined Globo TV, where he managed the production of Web games including licenced fare for the likes of Big Brother Brasil. Upon arriving in the UK in 2006, Olifiers joined Jagex, before moving into social games with EA’s Playfish in 2009. In 2010 he co-founded Bossa Studios, where his job title is officially gamer-in-chief, and in 2017 he revived Sinclair’s ZX Spectrum with the foundation of SpecNext, whose Spectrum Next was released as a fullfeatured home computer platform in 2020. A 2.0 version is due in 2023.
Above all, though, I think that the biggest lesson from Worlds Adrift relates to user-generated content. I may be wrong on this but, as far as I can tell, Worlds Adrift was the first game that was launched with 100 per cent of the content created by players. Every island in Worlds Adrift was made by a player. And the quality level of the islands players created was so much higher than we could possibly predict. So the biggest lesson with Worlds Adrift was that, if you build with your players, they will invariably surprise you – in a good way – with how much quality and content they can create with you.
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I kicked myself for being surprised because if you look at some of the biggest successes in our history, they’ve been generated by players, right? Dota was a Warcraft III mod, Counter-Strike started out as a mod, as did the first battle royale game, DayZ. The evidence is all there.
The question is: how do we foster this community going forward? And that applies directly to Lost Skies, which is going to be built with the players. This is definitely the lesson that we took with Surgeon Simulator 2, which ships with a huge UGC component. Open development, and building with your players, is the name of the game for us.
Does it feel that the days of making games in isolation are behind you for good?
For us, yes, but not everybody embraces it the same way. Of course, in game development there has always been focus testing and things like that, but in my personal experience, this is very different. I like having the community discussing things between themselves and us, rather than it simply being us talking to them. It changes the nature of the conversation in quite a significant way. Also, there is strength in numbers, so it’s helpful when you are able to deploy things like analytics. When you look at a level and apply a heat map to see where everybody’s dying, where they’re struggling, or where everybody wants to go, you can immediately understand if there are failures in your design or there are opportunities you can seize. That is invaluable, and you cannot quite get that extent of feedback from focus testing, where it’s more about difficulty curves, UI and UX problems, and difficulties players might have with controls. If a player is struggling with progression in your game, focus testing makes it obvious – there is no better way of getting feedback than sitting behind a screen and watching people struggling firsthand. But when it comes to more subtle things and design features and decisions, having access to the people who are talking amongst themselves about these things is where the value lies.
Worlds Adrift was built using Improbable’s SpatialOS cloud technology, which has since gone in a different direction. Does that now feel like something of a dead end for games? Or can you see it having some kind of resurgence at some point in the future, possibly in a different format?
It’s hard to say because at the time it was technology still in flux. And it’s been five years since I last became informed about what it does, and I’m not familiar with why they’ve transitioned into Metaverse and blockchain areas. As a player myself, I have not seen many other games being made with it. We certainly underestimated the challenge of creating a game of the scope of Worlds Adrift, and perhaps that was one of the reasons why the technology wasn’t particularly suited for it.
With more and more games emerging with an emphasis on player-generated content, is there a risk that the supply of good talent among the community is going to be spread rather thin? Is that kind of thing ever a consideration when you’re making a game with UGC at the forefront?
It is, but you’re familiar with Dunbar’s number, right? The number that shows up in every social structure is around 120: villages were that size, the average person’s social network is that size, etc. And there is a similar rule for user interaction and creation, which you’ll see in things like YouTube and Wikipedia. The numbers are very similar in our experience with UGC as well: around ten per cent of the players will be willing to build things, and within that ten per cent, around five per cent – or 0.5 per cent of the overall total – will create stuff which is of a standard that everybody else would appreciate.
The best way to get UGC created is by having it attached to a game that enables spin-offs or expansions of that experience. It’s not for nothing that Dota came out of Warcraft III and Counter-Strike came out of Half-Life – big ideas in themselves, right? Because the critical mass was already there. A big exception is of course Roblox, which is a platform for the platform’s sake. But the content you find on Roblox can be very different, and very peculiar – it’s not just games but also ‘experiences’ and things like that. It can be very topical as well, changing and reflect what we’re watching on TV, for example – the Roblox community made content based on Squid Game and so on.
So I believe it is an endless creative pot that you’re tapping into. Of course, nothing is endless, but there is far more than can be consumed. YouTube is a great example of that, right? There is no way you could consume all of the good content that exists on YouTube. For me, it’s about entry barriers. YouTube is home to so much content because it’s super easy for you to get hold of a camera, find a topic you’re passionate about, and then make a video – but to create a mod for a game? Not so easy. So the question is: how accessible are your tools? How much coaching does your audience need? How much of a community is there to help players create something great? What I’ve seen work really well in this respect is a creator taking something good and dissecting it for the community in order to show how it was made, which helps to create a new baseline for everyone, and then you will see stuff emerging that is even better than that. That positive loop keeps raising the quality of the content so that eventually the community has generated stuff that is much better than professionals could create themselves. But it all requires a certain kind of care and attention. Otherwise, just left to its own devices, you would have spikes here and there, but the baseline wouldn’t move upward.
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A good example of a baseline increasing and raising quality all round was the old Source mod scene, where there was so much competition between things like Firearms, Counter-Strike and Day Of Defeat. They were all trying to be the one, right? It’s kind of a similar dynamic when y...