Squirrelled away in the warren of streets that spill out from East London’s Silicon Roundabout, Bossa Studios hardly advertises its location in six-foot high neon. Just a small sign on a heavy door in a modest tower block. One more segment in the honeycomb that so many tech start-ups have made their home. Push through the door, though, and there’s a frisson of energy. The air crackles throughout the snug, open-plan office as developers go about their work. One stands under huge windows framed with bright orange blinds, scribbling away at their latest game’s concept art. Another twists and turns with a virtual reality headset attached to their head. More still surround a whiteboard, making plans. A cat, meanwhile, is the one exception to the verve, dozing on a window sill. Trust a cat.

The liveliness fits. Bossa, founded in 2010 by Henrique Olifiers, Imre Jele, Ric Moore and Roberta Lucca, has a prolific and wildly varied output. Starting with Facebook game Monstermind, Bossa has gone on to make an RPG based on the BBC’s Merlin, the comedic Surgeon Simulator, mathematical platformer Twelve a Dozen and arguably the Apple Watch’s best game, in which you take control of a spy network. Their latest, I Am Bread, has you controlling an unwieldy slice of bread that just wants to become toast. Bossa has found critical and commercial success in their endeavours, racking up the extraordinary record of a nomination for a video game BAFTA in three of the company’s five years of existence.

Monstermind was the base, honing in on the short-lived boom of Facebook as a gaming platform. “At the time Facebook was getting people playing games for the first time,” Olifiers says. “Teaching people how to navigate an isometric environment and the core game mechanics of investment for output.” Farmville was the most high-profile success of this model, with players building on their own plot of land and getting their friends to help out.

The idea behind Monstermind was to incorporate some of the rules laid down by these casual games, while introducing more established video game elements: alliances and player vs player competition, for example, as you built your town and bred monsters. You could then send your monster off to attack a pal’s settlement, and defend yourself against counter-attacks. While Monstermind was Bossa’s first game, the founding members had the experience to make it work. Olifiers and Jele had both previously worked on popular fantasy MMO Runescape while at Cambridge developer Jagex, while Olifiers had knowledge of large-scale social games from his time at social giant Playfish.

Bossa's first game for Facebook, Monstermind

The game was a success, racking up over 2 million players and winning a BAFTA in 2012 for the best browser-based game. Monstermind remains the game Olifiers is most fond of. “It was the most fun to make,” he says. “Sweet and sour, though, because it was also the most troublesome, trying to build a game and a company at the same time. It was many sleepless nights, 4am in the morning trying to keep the servers up and things like that. But I have fond memories of how that game was received and how many people love that game.”

Bossa Studios co-founder Henrique Olifiers Credit: 2011 Satureyes Photography www.satureyes.com +44 20 7193 7156/Rick Bronks

Most importantly, Monstermind’s success meant Bossa has a foundation to build on, with investment coming in from the multimedia company Shine prior to release. Bossa followed Monstermind with another Facebook game, a social RPG based on the BBC’s Merlin series, but by that time the viability of Facebook as a serious gaming platform had shifted dramatically. Casual players had moved on to mobile and tablet gaming, while social network games never reached a level that more serious players would be interested in.

Olifiers laments the failure of Facebook to reach its gaming potential, but Bossa quickly changed tack. There was a degree of good fortune to their next game, Surgeon Simulator. Bossa was taking part in 2013’s Global Gamejam, a competition in which developers have to design a game from conception to playability in just 48 hours. This particular gamejam’s theme was ‘heartbeat’, but while most developers would use that to create abstract sound or visuals, Bossa’s team took the brief more literally and made a game about open heart surgery. One criteria to score highly was to use more than ten buttons, which lead to the idea of using individual keys to control each finger of a hand. The result was a deliberately clumsy, hilarious and fairly gruesome slapstick with the player’s surgeon cracking ribs with claw hammers and dropping pens into intestines. The team realised they had something and while they reduced to five keys and introduced mouse controls to make it more fun, the game’s momentum had outstripped the need to match the gamejam’s criteria.

Surgeon Simulator was conceived in a 48-hour gamejam, now a crucial part of Bossa's philosophy

So happy were Bossa with the concept, they put Surgeon Simulator into full production. Its black humour and awkward controls made for a unique proposition that captured people’s imaginations, and its comedy value made it the ideal game for burgeoning YouTubers to feature on their channels. Word of mouth and YouTube popularity lead to Surgeon Simulator’s success, so far selling over 2 million copies.

Gamejams are now a crucial part of Bossa’s philosophy, with the studio holding internal jams every month, allowing developers to throw ideas around to see what sticks. Through these jams, Bossa makes around 35 games into a playable state every year, with 2 or 3 making it into full production. Olifiers believes they are one of the first developers to perform this practice with such regularity, but it is becoming more common. “There have been a lot of studios coming to us to talk about how we do things,” he says. “A few have started to roll that out, but not as frequently as we do. Part of the problem is that it takes a while to get the hang of. The first six or seven gamejams we did were fun but didn’t produce anything tangible. A success rate of 1 in 30 seems small, but if you look at it another angle, it’s a way of filtering out 93% of potential failures. It’s something that’s ingrained on the culture of the company, we’re built like this. For you to change a culture into that take some time, but there’s a drive and willingness to do it.”

Bossa’s latest game, I Am Bread, was a direct result of one of these gamejams. In it, you control a sentient piece of bread that only wants to become toast. It is a brilliantly infuriating game, as you flop your wholemeal across tabletops and up cabinets and walls, sticking to surfaces with each corner of crust. Your goal is to find a heat source, so you can turn crisp and golden, before you become inedible from grime picked up along the way. It is a spiritual successor to Surgeon Simulator, employing a similar level of surreal comedy and deliberately awkward controls. The idea came from Luke Williams, one of Surgeon’s original team, birthed from a single simple thought. “I eat a lot of toast,” says Williams, smiling at the surrealism. “And I thought if I was a piece of bread, I’d want to become toast, so it came from a random thought.”

Daft as it sounds, this is what Bossa’s gamejams were conceived for, allowing its designers to explore even the silliest thought and see if they can be spun into playable, fun games. If not, there is nothing lost, but if so, Bossa could have a hit on its hands. The team saw something in Williams’ sentient bread and the game went into full production, with multiple levels and extra modes: bagel racing, baguette destruction and one in which the rooms are zero-gravity, the bread has rocket boosters attached and you have to pilot your slice into the toaster like docking a spaceship.

I Am Bread's surreal 'zero-gravity' mode

You could hardly accuse the team of lacking variety, then, but a common theme is making use of new technology and input. Surgeon uses keyboard and mouse like a pair of hands, Bread tangles your hands around a PS4 controller or touchscreen. Bossa are looking heavily into virtual reality and produced one of the Apple Watch’s first games in Spy Watch, despite not having access to Apple’s hardware until late into development. Spreading their net so wide, says Olifiers, is a philosophical rather than commercial decision. “We know that if we specialise, we’d probably be more commercially successful. To some extent, though, if you hit on something special, something unique, all of a sudden you can be more commercially successful ten times over than a specialist. But our risk factor is higher, because we don’t follow up on exploring a genre we have mastered. It’s a conscious decision, but it’s the best decision to make given the team composition we have.”

So far, this has served Bossa well, with its games consistently finding an audience due to their offbeat nature and, more importantly, being good fun. But it isn’t going to lead to complacency in such a fickle market. “We’re not assured of success in the future,” says Olifiers. “We’re very keen to never rest and push the envelope as much as we can. But we’re very aware that it only takes one misstep to knock a studio like us down.”

Such pragmatism doesn’t seem to have stymied ambition. Bossa’s next game is its biggest and potentially most risky. Worlds Adrift is an emergent online multiplayer game set on a planet imbued with a mineral that causes matter to levitate. Overmining from the world’s nations means the planet’s crust –floating over a hollow core—has broken apart into fractured islands.

Players are dropped into the world on a random island and are left to their own devices, building flying ships and gathering resources. And as a persistent online world, any changes you make are permanent and obvious to any other player that happens to pass by, whether it’s a fallen tree or a crashed ship (ripe for salvage, of course).

Part of the inspiration for Worlds Adrift comes from the recent wave of online sandboxes, particularly Minecraft. Olifiers believes the freedom of Mojang’s game has permanently altered the landscape for large-scale online games. “The generation of players that grew up on Minecraft can’t go back to an MMO that sets them on trails and says you have to do this and nothing else,” he says. “They won’t put up with that. They want a game where they’re free to do what they want.”

This is the philosophy behind Worlds Adrift, then, with no objectives given to its players besides making their way how they choose. It will be fascinating to see how it turns out.

Given the quirkier nature of Bossa’s previous output, the temptation is to call World’s Adrift a departure. But Bossa’s philosophy means that the studio has never resorted to type, whether its social monsters, learning tools, clumsy surgeons or self-aware breakfast treats. Here is a team that seems to believe it can do anything, and is trying to do just that.