So we’re finally here – Toca Boca’s launch day! The last day of the first products, and the first day of everything else. We’ve been looking forward to this day for quite a while, so I thought I’d take you back a little to tell about where we started.

September 2010

I managed to convince Emil to join me on this new venture that we called Brickmark. We had worked together on the Mag+ project at Bonnier R&D before so I knew that we would work as a team. Our first project and focus for the upcoming months was to be kids games of some sort. And the research began. Emil went to the Playful conference in London and came back very inspired.

October 2010

We hired our first game designer Jens Peter, and started to explore the world of touchscreen based games properly. A lot of play testing, mapping, segmenting and reading. We found that the available games pointed in one direction, while they way that kids played pointed in several different ones. This led us to start looking at physical toys instead, and approaching the topic of play from a broader perspective. Also, a lot of sitting around in a small, temporary and fairly dull office.

November 2010

In search of developers, we invited Cocoaheads Stockholm over to the office. We showed them a few examples of how a new wave of games and play on the iOS platform were using the available possibilites. A particularly enthusiastic guy in the front row of the picture turned out to be Andrey. He is our all-time favorite Ukrainian, and joined us as a playsmith.

We started making our product development process. It has an evolutionary theme, and involves a lot of testing with kids before making it into production.

We had our first thoughts and discussions around the name and visual identity of the brand that later became Toca Boca.

December 2010

Our second game designer Chris joined us, and things started moving for real. We had our first idea generating workshop, and came up with about a hundred different themes to investigate.

We tried to get our new office in shape which required some unconventional seating initially:

We met with Mats Johansson from ACNE JR that made our beautiful logo, and we did the first play tests with kids which we filmed and tried to learn from. The concepts worked well overall, but there’s a lot to be learned from this way of testing.

Just before Christmas, we went to Malmö and talked with Media Evolution and local game developers like Mandelform and Binary Peak about what was lacking in the games value chain. Quite a bit, it seemed.

January 2011

Go time! We started production of our first two games and an internal league of iOS-gaming. Our art director Emil Berner took on Helicopter Taxi, and for Toca Tea Party we worked together with Mathilda Engman. Since we were waiting for our second developer, Jack, to start, we got some great help from Axolot.

We made a teaser website and launched the game studio name in public. The Brewery and Anton Lindqvist made us the site.

February 2011

We started planning our game trailers, and recorded them slightly later. Production started to round up, and we decided on our third game. Some additional game testing, and a load more of bug testing! Requiring the team to lie on the floor while doing it.

March 2010

We’re here! Our first two games are released in the App Store and it feels amazing! There’s loads more to come and a lot of hard work remains, but we’ve really started up this company in a fantastic way. Make sure to stick around and watch what we’re releasing next! Try out Helicopter Taxi and Toca Tea Party if you want a better feel of what we’ve been doing.