Last Thursday at GDC, James Silva, lead dishwasher at Ska Studios, gave a postmortem for last year’s XBLA hit The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile. He opened with the story of how the first game in the series, The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai came to be.

As a hobbyist developer in 2007, Silva submitted Dead Samurai as a Dream.Build.Play contestant just months before graduating college in upstate New York. Writing it off as something he didn’t believe would actually win, he soon forgot about it and began to work as a Java developer for a local business upon finishing college. Two months later he received a phone call that changed his life.

Microsoft had contacted Silva to let him know that they wanted him to come out to their offices in Seattle, and that he had won an XBLA contract. For several months he “did the starving artist thing,” and before he knew it, he had a shipped title. As a project done by one man, it was certainly impressive: it eclipsed the 200,000 sales mark, and not only did fans crave a sequel, but so did Microsoft.

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It’s been a hell of a ride for Fez creator Paul Fish, but after nearly five years in development, his adorable world-rotating platformer will be finally be available soon. Just because Fez hasn’t been released yet doesn’t mean it hasn’t been racking up the awards, and it recently added the $30,000 Seumas McNally Grand Prize in this year’s Independent Game Festival to its trophy case. This is Fez’s second IGF award; the game also won for Excellence in Visual Art in 2008.

Super T.I.M.E. Force won the Microsoft XBLA Award, which means that we can look forward to seeing the chaotic retro shooter from Capy Games, the developers of Sword and Sworcery, on the Xbox LIVE Marketplace, hopefully in the near future. You can check out the full list of winners below:

Seumas McNally Grand Prize: Fez, by Polytron

Nuovo Award: Storyteller, by Daniel Benmergui

Excellence in Visual Arts: Dear Esther, by thechineseroom

Excellence in Audio: Botanicula, by Amanita Design

Excellence in Design: Spelunky, by Mossmouth

Best Student Game: Way, by CoCo & Co.

Technical Excellence: Antichamber, by Demruth

Best Mobile Game: Beat Sneak Bandit, by Simogo

Audience Award: Frozen Synapse, by Mode 7 Games

Microsoft XBLA Award: Super T.I.M.E. Force, by Capy Games

Source: IGF

On Thursday morning at GDC, Chase Boyd, who works in the Windows Graphics Division at Microsoft, presented a speech titled “Creating a Great Metro Style Game,” where he divulged details about this new process. Throughout the talk, XNA was nowhere to be found, but I questioned him about transferring a current XNA project over to Metro, and he assured me that Microsoft “is currently working on the white paper to streamline that process,” and that the updates in Visual Studio 2011 will further simplify that process.

“When we implemented this new sample framework and set up the samples, we modeled it as close as we could with XNA. In fact, with a lot of the new syntax improvements which have been incorporated in Visual Studio [2011], the code can be pretty easily pasted over. We’ve also structured those example code bases to work the way an XNA person would expect the way they would want.” While they haven’t published any papers yet detailing precisely how to port a game over, he assured me that it is currently in the works.

One concept new to many developers coming from XNA, however, is the fact that “Windows 8 is a touch-first device,” meaning that it is largely geared toward inputs from a user’s fingers, as opposed to an external piece of hardware such as a controller. Fortunately, the APIs for a number of joysticks and controllers are included, so there is no need to fret just yet.

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Klei Entertainment has so far shown an aptitude for gory beat ‘em ups with the Shank series. Afraid of being pigeonholed as developer of a single type of game, they’re switching things up a bit with Mark of the Ninja. A text adventure introduction to the new game is live on the game’s site, www.MarkoftheNinja.com, and completing it leads to a little bonus. I’ll let you play through yourself, but here’s one spoiler: it contains ninjas.