Some people were critical that the music [in the Squadron 42 vertical slice] was maybe a little too intense at times. Why did you do that?

Well, a couple things. The vertical slice is actually something that's educational for us as the development team as well. It's actually why we make these things. It's shown to the community so you can see what we've been up to, but the reality is that is how I gain insight into whether or not my music's working, and I don't believe it's working 100%. The thing about what I do is I write music and then I find any way that I can incrementally improve any bit of it. I happen to agree actually in a lot of cases with the way it's played in the vertical slice. It's a pre-alpha, right?

That's the very first implementation.

Right, exactly. And it's not necessarily the final version of the mix or the final version of the volume or the intensity of anything. So, in fact, I actually went through it with my red pen and I wrote down a little bit: this is what we need to carve here, this is what we need to do there. And working with the audio team in the UK, the game engine is going to...

The music logic system.

The music logic system will be tweaked in such a way that it'll support the player's experience with the music as opposed to invade it. So let's say the launch sequence, well, that's a good moment for music to be in your face and big. But if you're flying from one place to another, it's not necessarily the place for the big tune. It's more ambient, it should be setting the mood, and is it tense, or is it heroic, or is it that, but it doesn't need to overstate it. So those are all things that we are working on, myself and the audio team in the UK, to make it better. Let me put it this way, the pre-alpha version that you guys saw in the vertical slice is the absolute worst that that could ever be. And in fact, it's quite promising to see it looking this good this early.

I know one of the features of the music logic system that wasn't completely online at the time that we did the demo is how it mixes with the dialogue. The music is supposed to dip down at the moments when people talk and stuff like that.

Well, and there's another thing the music logic is doing in there that would be transparent, I think, when you're watching a video of a playback like that, which is what that was. The music is written in such a way that the music logic system inside the game can actually score the player's actions as they happen. That was step one when I talked with the audio team, Phil and Lee Banyard, about how can we get the game to make the decisions that I would make if this were a movie and I were scoring it. So all the music is written... Let me put it this way. I would not be surprised if there are whole pieces of music that certain players don't hear because they went that way instead of that way. There's a mass of music that's there and the engine is making a lot of clever, very situation-dependent decisions about what to play to the player as they're going through.