Do you feel it makes it easier to write music for a universe that feels so alive versus making music that's not based on a game?

There are different problems. Usually, when you write for a movie, the deadlines are much shorter. You have to write it much faster. And you can actually make the music work with the mix that you have. For example, if you already have the sound effects and the dialogue, you can make music in a way that will work with that. Sometimes it can be simpler, sometimes it can be more complex. You always have to judge everything. When you're doing music for a game, you don't know what's happening in the game. Well, sometimes you do, but for ambient music, you don't know exactly what's happening in the game. So in both worlds there are many different situations and specific problems that occur.

On Star Citizen, I do tend to work a lot on both sides of it. When I do music for marketing, I'm doing music as if it was for a movie, with a bit of a longer deadline than usual, because when I'm writing for a commercial or for movies, there are days of deadline. You have one day to make a cue, one day or less than a day. It has to come out, and it has to come out good. And for a game, you usually tend to have a bit more time. Not always in Star Citizen. In Star Citizen, sometimes you also have a short deadline, plus all the aspects that come with the fact that the game is never linear. You don't know what's happening, what the sound effects are going to be. So when you compose for a game, if you know there can be an explosion, maybe you can't make any percussion that sounds too low anywhere during the whole two or three minutes of the song, because it can happen at the start or at the end. If you're scoring a movie and you know the explosion is going to occur at that moment, you can beef up the percussion before that and then calm down on the explosion, or the mixer will just mix it, because it's actually a mixer that will mix the movie. So I think both have a lot of challenges. One thing you have to do is try to make good music. There are two styles of music, good and bad; try to make the good one.