Amazon Games has nabbed the exclusive publishing rights to an upcoming (but undisclosed) game from Korean game dev Smilegate RPG.

It’s not Amazon’s first foray into game publishing by any means, but considering many of its headline-making activities of late have involved development rather than publishing its a notable change of pace.

Both of those Amazon Games-developed projects, New World and Crucible, are online games, making for a bit of overlap with what Smilegate typically offers. Amazon says in a statement that this shared interest is part of what endears it about Smilegate RPG and its parent company Smilegate.

“Smilegate has a strong track record of creating big games that players love, built to offer years of enjoyment — exactly the type of best-in-class, living, growing online games we want to bring our customers,” reads a statement from Amazon Games VP Christoph Hartmann.

On the Smilegate side of things, the Korean dev studio sees the deal as a gateway to bring an unnamed Smilegate RPG title to the West. A statement from the company adds that Amazon’s entire suite of properties (like Twitch, Prime Gaming, and AWS) makes the arrangement an attractive partnership as well.

“Smilegate RPG and Amazon Games will combine our respective expertise to introduce one of our AAA games to Western players. Amazon Games is uniquely positioned as a publisher to reach entirely new audiences through its deep commitment to customers and substantial games publishing resources and channels,” adds Smilegate RPG CEO Chi Won Gil.

You may not recognize the name Wilbert Roget, but you’ve probably heard his work. Roget was a music editor at Lucasarts for many years, and he wrote original music for Star Wars: The Old Republic and Star Wars: First Assault, and arranged and supervised music for Monkey Island 2: Special Edition. Since then, he’s been the composer for titles like Guild Wars 2: Path of Fire, Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris, and Dead Island 2.

Roget also served as composer on the powerful, memorable music for the recently released Call of Duty: World War II. He spoke to Gamasutra about his inspirations, his attempts to stay true to the time period of the game, and how to score with special f/x in mind.

Roget: I had played and loved Sledgehammer Games’ previous game, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, and was strongly interested in working with the company on a future project. One of my former-coworkers from LucasArts had worked as a sound designer on Modern Warfare 3, so I asked him to put me in touch with Sledgehammer Games’ audio director, Dave Swenson. It turns out Dave had recently played a previous game I scored, Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris, and so we met a few weeks later at the Game Developers Conference. Several months of follow-up meetings and Skype conversations later, and eventually I was hired.

Composer Wilbert Roget

“All in all, it was about six months to write the full score.”

We had our first on-site meeting to begin the process sometime in late January. But I started sketching various ideas on paper all the way back in August, as soon as I knew it would be a WWII-era score. The score for the original Call of Duty had such a big influence on me back in college, so I immediately had some ideas I wanted to explore.

Ultimately very little of those sketches made it into the game, with the exception of the minimalist triple-meter concept I used in the ‘Berga’ track. My first game-specific pieces were written in early February, and we had our final recording sessions towards the end of July, so, all in all, it was about six months to write the full score.

“A Brotherhood of Heroes” by Wilbert Roget

For my overall direction, my inspirations came from several different media. I was already familiar with the first Call of Duty scores as well as Modern Warfare and Advanced Warfare, but when the project began I started to study a few war films to see how their scores interacted with the drama.

Of those, I’d say The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty, and Saving Private Ryan were the most tonally relevant even though my score doesn’t sound overtly similar. I also studied several pieces of 20th-century art music very closely: Claude Vivier’s ‘Zipangu,’ Toru Takemitsu’s ‘Requiem for String Orchestra‘ and of course Penderecki’s famous ‘Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima.’

“I only had an illustrated storyline document to work with at my personal studio. I didn’t have a chance to play the game while scoring.”

After my first meeting onsite at Sledgehammer Games, I only had an illustrated storyline document to work with at my personal studio. Sledgehammer sent me a few gameplay capture videos later on, but I didn’t have a chance to play the game while scoring. Actually, when writing the first few in-game pieces, I used gameplay footage from Call of Duty 2’s ‘Rangers Lead the Way’ level to check if my own music would fit the mood and soundscape, as that level is both high-octane and has long stretches without music.

Testing against gameplay footage reassured me of the efficacy of my sonic experiments, like my use of solo strings and period-accurate musique concrète. It also helped me arrange the music in such a way that it complemented the sound design instead of competing against it. And then towards the end of the project, there were two pieces, ‘Birds of Prey’ and ‘Berga,’ which I wrote for specific levels’ gameplay footage.

“The game used original recordings of historically-accurate weaponry and vehicles, and so we wanted to make sure the sound design would be unobstructed by musical elements.”

This was one of the first considerations I had when developing the musical direction for the game, and one of our audio director Dave Swenson’s primary concerns when starting the project. Call of Duty: WWII used original recordings of historically-accurate weaponry and vehicles, and so we wanted to make sure the sound design would be unobstructed by musical elements.

We had several solutions for making sure the music would be effective while avoiding conflict with the soundscape. First off, I stripped down the traditional battery of orchestral percussion, avoiding sounds like snare drums and mallets that would compete with gunfire or stick out of the mix. I also avoided big epic trailer-esque percussion and overt use of synthesizers, since I envisaged the soundscape would provide more than enough punch and excitement in the mix.

I did use some large drums and dhol ensembles, but I never let their volume get above a mp level; their only purpose was to add bass and a tiny bit of motion to certain high-intensity action pieces. In place of this percussion, I employed the aforementioned musique concrète technique: sounds from period vehicles and other military sources were heavily processed and used to create a “haze of war” effect.

I avoided high woodwinds as well, and I only used trumpets to double the horn section at key moments. The strings were a fairly typical section with 34 players, but I intentionally avoided the highest range of violins to avoid letting the orchestra poke out too much. I also used solo strings and string quartet extensively, to get sharp and crisp rhythmic elements in action cues especially.

Lastly, we embraced a relatively dry overall music mix, with lots of high-end clarity and not too much reverb. As a result of all this, the music was mixed somewhat louder in-game than is usual for the franchise, but it still never conflicts with sound design.

“Welcome To The Bloody First” by Wilbert Roget

For Call of Duty: WWII, the music team at Sony Interactive Entertainment was hired to supervise, mix, edit and implement the score. They would spot the game levels and assign me music “suites” that they could then edit and implement into the game, with music changes at key moments during each level. As a composer, I didn’t need to keep the gameplay dynamics in mind while writing — I simply had to make sure that each piece I delivered contained a few different moods, had stinger moments built-in naturally, and featured as much movement and development as possible.

We did have a stealth music mechanic however, which involved writing pieces that included brief one-shot stingers for when the player is detected by enemies, as well as a few swells into combat. That was the only case where I had to write to the implementation. Normally I would write through-composed pieces with enough drama for the Sony team to edit from.

“For Sledghammer’s team to do their work, I needed to deliver my music in up to 30+ stems per cue.”

For their team to do their work, I needed to deliver my music in up to 30+ stems per cue. In other words, instead of just sending over a stereo render of the piece, I had to split into “low strings short,” low strings sustains,” “high strings short,” and so on for the entire orchestra — as well as delivering individual renders of every non-orchestral element.

My solution involved creating a folder within my Reaper project file that contained in-line renders of all the stems, with automatic soloing via track groups. I’d still have to manually record each stem, but this made it very easy to test my stems for accuracy. In the rare instances where I needed to revise a cue even after it was approved, those changes were easy to make.

Finally, I wrote the entire score in a single Reaper project file, but I wouldn’t call that a technical “challenge” per se. This is how I have written every one of my orchestral scores since Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris, and because I only use a single PC without VEpro, this saves me tons of time starting new cues and revising old ones. It also helps me keep a consistent mix, and it helps me easily reuse live-recorded solos and sound design elements.

One unique aspect of working with the Sony team in producing a score is that they don’t have a big generic cue list saying, for instance, “Ambient 08” or “Action 13”. Instead, they assign specific suites with clear direction on the mood and sonic direction. So as soon as I had an idea and was sketching on paper, I already had a good sense of the emotional context of the piece, and how I would satisfy it.

From there it was just a matter of arranging everything, creating a synthesized mockup, and frequently taking a step back to see if there were other elements I could add (or remove!) to help the piece fit the overall musical direction. For instance, my final step in most tracks would be to create a second layer in the music, which again I called the “haze of war” effect — this usually meant adding things like brass-sliding electric guitar played with an ebow and tons of reverb/delay, or adding my musique concrète elements like steam train sounds, distant explosion debris, and various metallic sounds.

Because Call of Duty: WWII takes place in real-life settings, it was crucially important the music was respectful in tone. For the score to work, I needed to make sure that every piece had a concise focus, avoiding excessive embellishment in the orchestration and especially melodies. At the advice of our audio director, I used as few “syllables” as possible in my themes and motives, and to make sure that every piece in the score sounds unique to this game, I used signature sounds and themes as much as possible. For that reason, I believe this is the most cohesive score I’ve written to date.

“Game music is an incredibly competitive field, but having technical knowledge as well as creative ability will certainly give you an edge.”

I’m in this industry because I’m in love with games and the way they are created. We have brilliant artists, programmers, and designers who are constantly pushing the envelope with clever solutions to both creative and technical problems. When I play a game, that’s what I’m looking for: titles that create memorable, fantastic and seemingly impossible real-time experiences. Many of my friends are in the games industry working as those very same artists and programmers, and I enjoy reading and studying the technical side of games creation almost as much as I enjoy playing them.

My advice to other composers looking to enter the games industry is to know the medium, do your research and play both recent and classic titles. Understand how games scoring is different from film and TV, even when it’s the same composers working on all three. I’d also recommend studying how game audio implementation works, and practice by deconstructing how a game’s sound design and music implementation work while playing the game. Game music is an incredibly competitive field, but having technical knowledge as well as creative ability will certainly give you an edge.

How do the Boolean and and or operators work in the context of Python one-liners?

You may know the standard use of the logical operators applied to Boolean values:

>>> True and False

False

>>> False or True

True

But there’s more to these operators that only experts in the art of writing concise Python one-liners know.

For instance, the following use of the or operator applied to non-Boolean values is little known:

>>> 'hello' or 42 'hello'

>>> [] or 42

42

Similarly, the following use of the and operator often causes confusion in readers of advanced Python one-liners:

>>> 'hello' and 42

42

>>> [] and 42

[]

How do the and and or operator work when applied to non-Boolean operands?

To understand what is going on, you need to look at the definitions of the Boolean operators:

Study these explanations thoroughly! The return value is of the same data type of the operands—they only return a Boolean value if the operands are already Boolean!

This optimization is called short-circuiting and it’s common practice in many programming languages. For example, it’s not necessary to evaluate the result of the second operand of an and operation if the first operand evaluates to False. The whole operation must evaluate to False in this case because the logical and only returns True if both operands are True.

Python goes one step further using the property of implicit Boolean conversion. Every object can be implicitly converted to a Boolean value. That’s why you see code like this:

l = []

if l: print('hi')

else: print('bye')

# bye

You pass a list into the if condition. Python then converts the list to a Boolean value to determine which branch to visit next. The empty list evaluates to False. All other lists evaluate to True, so the result is bye.

Together, short circuiting and implicit Boolean conversion allow the logical operators and and or to be applied to any two Python objects as operands. The return value always is one of the two operands using the short circuiting rules described in the table.

Try it yourself in our interactive code shell:

Exercise: Guess the output! Then check if you were right! Create your own crazy operands and evaluate them by executing the code in your browser.

Python One-Liners Book

Python programmers will improve their computer science skills with these useful one-liners.

Python One-Liners will teach you how to read and write “one-liners”: concise statements of useful functionality packed into a single line of code. You’ll learn how to systematically unpack and understand any line of Python code, and write eloquent, powerfully compressed Python like an expert.

The book’s five chapters cover tips and tricks, regular expressions, machine learning, core data science topics, and useful algorithms. Detailed explanations of one-liners introduce key computer science concepts and boost your coding and analytical skills. You’ll learn about advanced Python features such as list comprehension, slicing, lambda functions, regular expressions, map and reduce functions, and slice assignments. You’ll also learn how to:

•  Leverage data structures to solve real-world problems, like using Boolean indexing to find cities with above-average pollution
•  Use NumPy basics such as array, shape, axis, type, broadcasting, advanced indexing, slicing, sorting, searching, aggregating, and statistics
•  Calculate basic statistics of multidimensional data arrays and the K-Means algorithms for unsupervised learning
•  Create more advanced regular expressions using grouping and named groups, negative lookaheads, escaped characters, whitespaces, character sets (and negative characters sets), and greedy/nongreedy operators
•  Understand a wide range of computer science topics, including anagrams, palindromes, supersets, permutations, factorials, prime numbers, Fibonacci numbers, obfuscation, searching, and algorithmic sorting

By the end of the book, you’ll know how to write Python at its most refined, and create concise, beautiful pieces of “Python art” in merely a single line.

Get your Python One-Liners Now!!

Apple has clarified the situation with the WordPress iOS app, apologizing for the mistake of blocking developer updates to the app until they added in-app purchases, despite the app not including any functionality involving payments.

Nintendo apparently held its “final” Splatoon 2 Splatfest last July (Pearl won, by the way) and ended major support for the game. Despite this, it has continued to roll out minor updates and in recent times has been hosting additional Splatfests.

This weekend, as you might recall, is the all-time classic: Chicken vs. Egg. So pick a side in Inkopolis Square and join the battle.

The original Chicken vs. Egg Splatfest was held in 2018 and Chicken took out the victory with a 2 – 1 win. It was also apparently the first time a “solid white” colour was used in the game (no, mayo doesn’t count).

When we find out the results of this latest Chicken vs. Egg battle later this weekend, we’ll update this post. In the meantime, tell us in the comments and poll which side you’re fighting for.

Feral Interactive has announced that the world war II game, Company of Heroes, is making the jump to Android and iPhone on September 10. The classic RTS game landed on iPad earlier this year, and received pretty favourable reviews – read our very own Company of Heroes review for our thoughts! Here’s some more info about the release from Feral Interactive:

“Company of Heroes offers players an epic WWII campaign, with gameplay comprised of intense squad-based battles that progress from the D-Day landings through to the liberation of Normandy. Designed for phones, this version of the game allows mobile gamers to direct all the action from a user interface highly tailored to touch controls.”

Sounds like lots of fun to us! Company of Heroes is, of course, a premium game, and is going to set you back $13.99 (£13.99) when it launches on September 10. Either way, this port feels long overdue, and is especially exciting for Android users – like me – who are finally going get a chance to experience the classic RTS game on mobile.

Feral has also released a trailer with some gameplay footage, in case you want to watch:

We also got a list of suitable Android devices for running the game, so if you’ve got one of these, you’re in luck:

• Google Pixel 2 or better
• Samsung Galaxy S8 or better
• Samsung Galaxy Note8 or better
• OnePlus 5T / 6T / 7 / 8
• Sony Xperia 1 / XZ2 Compact
• HTC U12+
• LG V30+
• Motorola Moto Z2 Force
• Nokia 8
• Xiaomi Mi 6 / Mi 9 / Mi 9T
• Xiaomi Pocophone F1
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 8 Pro

Company of Heroes is on Google Play – where you pre-register now – and the App Store. If you want some similar games, be sure to see our lists of the best mobile strategy games, and the best mobile war games!

Jet Lancer, a Code Wakers-developed shoot ’em up that launched on Switch back in May, is set to receive a mighty Arcade Mode update. The best news? It’s free!

This new update includes a brand-new endless wave mode featuring rogue-lite elements and “nail-biting boss team-up battles”, as well as a few extra additions to the game. We’ve got a full rundown of the new stuff right here:

• An endless wave-based score-attack mode.
• Unique, stacking upgrades, making each run one-of-a-kind. The longer you survive, the more powerful you become.
• Multi-boss battles – fight multiple bosses from the story mode at the same time.
• Three new pilots with unique jets and handling.
• New Progressions system to unlock additional pilots and their jets
• Three new primary weapons
  
  • Flamethrower: Immense repeatable damage at very close range.
  • Railgun: Instantaneous precision shots.
  • Coil Gun: Chain lightning between grouped enemies.

The update has just gone live for players on Steam, with the Switch version of the update to follow. Hopefully we won’t have long to wait – the team tells us that it’ll arrive “soon” and is currently pending approval from Nintendo.

If you haven’t tried Jet Lancer yet, we’d urge you to check out our full review to learn more. If it’s for you, feel free to get it downloaded and enjoy the prospect of this new content arriving soon.