AN AUDIENCE WITH…

The Bossa boss on selling off hits, doubling down on co-op, and reinventing the ZX Spectrum

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.