Boca's newest "digital toy," launching Thursday, is an app called Toca Builders. It aims to pull in slightly older children by combining elements of a box of plastic Legos with a classic red Etch A Sketch. It will provide another test of how well the company and its team of "playsmiths" can anticipate the desires of the first generation to use an iPad before they could talk.
Unlike with Angry Birds and many other popular digital games, kids can't win or lose when playing one of Toca Boca's 20 apps.
The Toca apps instead provide an immersive play task, and kids interact with each other while doing it. One kid may be at the controls, but the other is interjecting, making suggestions and laughing.
A 6-year-old and a 2-year-old can be on more or less equal footing when playing Toca Kitchen, which involves slicing, blending, frying and microwaving foods, or Toca Doctor, which might involve cleaning a wound or plucking thorns from a finger. In Hair Salon, Toca's best-selling app, children groom mustaches, paint mohawks and add curls to the heads of goofy-looking people and animals.
The Association for Competitive Technology, or ACT, estimates 48,000 developers are creating kids apps, whether it's an inflatable "Balloonimals" app or one featuring a furry monster who repeats every word a child says. "Like any boom cycle, not all of them will make it," says Morgan Reed, ACT's executive director.
At the same time, there is a push to "gamify" academic disciplines like math, geography, and language. Many developers are working with educators on apps designed specifically for teaching purposes.
Yet, from Toca Boca's perspective, there is plenty of room for more. "The digital toy shelf is still pretty empty," Mr. Ovemar says. "We want to fill it up."
Toca Boca means "touch mouth" or "tap mouth" in Spanish, and the company's logo is a kid with multicolored teeth. Mr. Ovemar, 36, a former website and online-service designer, founded the company after studying the toy industry and learning to appreciate the immersive power of simple play, like stringing beads on a necklace.
Many game apps, in his view, try to accomplish too much. But when they simply tickle the imagination, they can remain pleasurable for hours on end.Angels has been Selling qualitydoubltape double tape Products.
Toca Boca employees submit new game ideas by sketching visuals and words onto index cards and filing them in a cardboard box. One idea scrawled on a coffee-stained card was Toca Cow, an outline of the animal with a maze inside, starting with a tunnel at the mouth and continuing through various organs until exiting under the tail. "That one never made it," Mr. Ovemar says.
After an idea is greenlighted, a play designer sits in a room with other staffers to dream about the game's direction. Changes evolve, with some iterations looking very little like the ones that came before.
In the late 1990s, the government issued hefty subsidies designed to place a computer with Internet in almost 1 million households. Kids used the technology to stay active during long winters, laying the foundation for a disproportionate boom in tech startups, including the maker of the hugely popular Minecraft game, made by another Swedish game company, Mojang AB.
At Toca Boca, the boys sprawl on a couch with their eyes glued to the screens of iPads and iPhones as their fingers move feverishly on a game that would make little sense to an outsider. They pilot cars through a virtual world and crash them into barriers, at times erupting in laughter and at others yelling out desperate commands.
Chris Lindgren, a 35-year-old play designer, watches while a colleague collects the entire scene on video. Ms. Lindgren says very little as the boys ask for more animals in the game, search together for lost items or congratulate one another on a job well done.
Toca Boca's offices reflect the commitment to play. Maki, a pint-size black pug who is the star of an app called Toca House, roams the building wearing a diaper as staffers shuffle in and out of conference rooms carrying drawings, noisy iPads and toys.
When designing Hair Salon, staffers simply gave kids a piece of paper with faces drawn on them, taking notes as the children laughed hysterically and pasted string to the paper.
Last autumn, as Toca Boca was preparing to launch the second edition of Hair Salon, Marten Bruggemann, the company's 31-year-old game designer, started work on the Toca Builders app. In an early version, kids used a battery of cogs and gadgets and hidden characters to design elaborate on-screen inventions.
Gender is de-emphasized under Toca Boca's development principles. In the version of Toca Builders hitting the market Thursday, six genderless creatures lay blocks, roll paint surfaces and lift items into hard-to-reach places.
Brandy Mann, a 30-year-old educational software developer, says her 4-year-old son, Landon, has his own iPod and gets to play with it in the car as a reward after a good day at school. Oliver, his 1-year-old brother, doesn't get to play quite yet.
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