"We've literally just signed a deal for the sequel last week, so for most of this year we've been thinking about the sequel, thinking about all sorts of things about what the game will be," said operations director Ailsa Bates.

Multiplayer-only game The Ship is set on a 1920s cruise liner, where each player is given a target whom he or she must kill while eluding would-be assassins.

While the first game was PC-only and distributed via Valve's Steam service with a later retail release, the sequel has been funded by a major publisher for PC and Xbox 360. "We're not able to tell you who they are right now because it's currently confidential," Bates went on. "They're a very big publisher and they've signed the full project, funded it, etcetera."