Silva has third Dishwasher game planned

The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai creator James Silva may have only recently unveiled a sequel, but already he's told Eurogamer that plans for a third game are laid down.

"I've got a whole chronology set up," he offered us. "But it might depend on how much Microsoft wants to let me do."

"This one [Vampire Smile - number two] is going to occur after some of the events that happened in the middle - the middle being what I want to make as a third game."

Clearly not busy enough, Silva also designed a game called Charlie Murder for Xbox Live Indie Games.

"Right when I finished Dead Samurai I started working on this Indie Game called Charlie Murder," explained Silva. "I put it on the back burner, but that's been revived.

"That game is... boy I can't really say! It's sitting around and it's going to be playable at PAX [East - 26th to 28th March]." From this we can probably infer it's attracted the attention of publisher.

James Silva's gory platform game The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai won Microsoft's XNA Dream-Build-Play competition, bagged an XBLA publishing deal and was released in April 2009 to wide critical acclaim - Eurogamer's included.

"Oh yeah," replied Silva, when asked if the game he built on his own sold well. "My hope for Dead Samurai when I was working on it was that I could continue what I was doing here. My company has grown from one to two! We've doubled!"

Silva revealed a follow-up to Dead Samurai, The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile, in February 2010.

"When I started the sequel I started the whole engine from scratch. If the guys at Microsoft had any idea how messy the code-base was [for Dead Samurai] by the time it was put into cert they would have pulled the plug!" blurted Silva. "It was a total house of cards; anything could pull the whole thing down. The game's a lot more expressive now."

"I really want to make combat flow better and be more fluid, dynamic and friendly," he said of the changes in the sequel. "It's more forgiving; you just press buttons and awesome stuff happens. It's more badass; it's really gory, it's excellent.

"The environment of the game is... Ah crap the cat's eating my food! I just turned around and she was sitting on the oven. Oh boy... I really want to create this environment where it changes around you."

Silva went on to say the game has two playable characters each with their own campaign. There's The Dishwasher and "this mystery lady". There will be story co-op online and offline, and "everything has been reworked from the ground up in terms of character art and animations".

"To me this feels like a next-gen sequel of Dead Samurai," added Silva. "That's just how it has been coming across to me. I go back and compare it to the first one and I'm like, 'Man!'"

He said people complaining that the Dead Samurai and Vampire Smile look similar really ought to "put them next to each other". "It's looking pretty good," he promised.

Silva's got the sequel playable "from start to finish", but still has Arcade Challenges to add and "tons and tons of bug fixing" to do. Therefore, added Silva, Vampire Smile will be out "when it's done".

"They don't really breathe down my neck," said Silva of Microsoft. "I'm on track with this milestone but I had told them I would be there months ago. But they said, 'Why don't you take some more time?' I have a habit of giving myself unreasonable milestones and then not meeting them. They're pretty good with that."

"They've been so helpful," he added. "There's an XNA team and a group of people that try to make [the game] work with Xbox Live Arcade, and I get the feeling they're just sitting there waiting for my call."

Looking ahead, it's unlikely that Silva's The Dishwasher series will head elsewhere. Microsoft gave him his break and he accepts that. "Everything I make is a Microsoft platform exclusive," he said.

"There are ways to port [the games]," he added, "but they're not easy. For iPhone games it's probably a little easier to port stuff because there are lots of similarities [in the code]. But I don't have the time right now.

"My favourite thing to work on is Xbox 360. If I had an extra me, I'd look into doing this stuff, but I'm happy with the status quo."

As a final note, we picked Silva's brain about the oddly-allocated Achievement Points in The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai.

He had this to say: "I had no idea people were that OCD about it! I really didn't know. I noticed they all came in multiples of five, but when I got my tools I was like, 'Oh cool, you can make them any number you want.' So I just put a bunch of random numbers in. It was a fun thing to do. I had no idea people would be so upset about it!