What was one of the biggest hurdles you've had to overcome in the scoring of Squadron 42?

Well, let's see. I think one of the trickiest parts about it is when you have, let's say, a long stretch where the player might be going from one place to the next, right? And what's going through the player's head is actually what the next task is, and they might have a busy mindset. But you need to do something with the music while they're traveling that is both not repetitive but interesting enough and keeps the pace going and that kind of thing. So one of the tricky things is finding ways to create music which can play for long stretches but isn't repetitive. So the way it's actually done, or what I've been trying to do, is write it in, say, three or four, I want to say stems, or something that can each play in different permutations. So you might not play all of it at once, or you could, but you can strip away certain elements or you can put certain elements in, different combinations of that same basic track, and that can actually be decided by... well, the game engine makes the decision, but we discuss with the audio team how to implement it. So it might be game-based.

Shortly before the release of Alpha 2.0, Pedro, who is the composer for Star Citizen, sent me this 20-minute-long track for Port Olisar, the area where most people are going to be. He goes, would you just listen to this all day and tell me if you're sick of it? So literally we had it on for two days straight. It's like, no, it's all right. It's good.

But that's a real hurdle, and it's not necessarily easy to write music that works like that. It almost goes against what composers are bred to do, so that does make it challenging, but it's also pretty exciting when it works, because the idea is to never intrude on the player experience, but instead to enhance it.