You said recently you want to give each ship a unique signature. In the past there was a more systemic, generic approach to this stuff. What prompted that philosophical change?

Well, initially when I came, I thought, OK, this is a marketable object. When I buy a vehicle, a car or something, I want to feel the weight of it. I want to feel the beauty of it. I want to hear it. I want to listen to stuff. It's a spaceship game intrinsically, initially. And then the most important thing for me is to increase the size of the department. So we've got six people actually to create the sounds, and that means we can give it much more bespoke sounds than they had previously before I came, and the guys are very aware of the intent that I want to project for the vehicles. And I'm hogging too much of the time.

I can go back on the audio direction kickoff that we do in the early stages during pre-production, because that's something I feel like oftentimes is not talked about enough or is not given enough credit. Simon comes in these meetings and he usually has these really wild ideas and he comes up with these really specific keywords for us to go on with. He makes some actual verbal sound effects and these are super valuable. It's actually kind of fun to do, we have a good time doing it, but also his ideas that he brings from his years of experience give us a lot of starting points to build our ideas from. And every ship that he sees on screen, we show him that this is the new ship we need to work on, and he comes up with a bunch of really different ideas from all the past ships. And that's a very good inspiration point to start from.