I think you might be the first person to ask me this, so I appreciate the question! I first started writing the music to AI War in the bedroom of my tiny broke down apartment when I had just turned 22 years old. I had been out of college for a few months, had no money, was working as a bank teller during the day, and only had until about 10 pm every night to write the music (thanks to my annoying roommate who needed his beauty sleep and could hear everything through our paper thin walls). At this point I had my music composition degree, but had only taken one semester of electro-acoustic composition, so I basically had no idea what I was doing. My tools? A 2008 MacBook pro (which has now stepped down... RIP you wonderful machine!), and the free copy of GarageBand that came with it. I had never written music for a video game before, and my only real experience with video games were the classics (Zelda, Mario, Tetris, etc) as well as just having finished playing through Kingdom Hearts. You ask where my inspiration came from? A lot of it from the first Kingdom Hearts game. Hence the Final Fantasy-ish, mellow, emotional tracks of AI War.
The theme of the game is probably the 10th version (we went through a lot of them) and that was my attempt at the moving space battle orchestral music that often goes along with space games. Problem was, I had very limited resources with GarageBand, and that was the best I could do at the time. The rest of the original score was basically whatever I could come up with. I'd lie on my couch in the apartment trying to crunch ideas out, but the themes that stuck and made it to the final cuts came out of nowhere at random times. The "Thor", "Metal", and "Warp" themes came to me after watching the Tenacious D movie, the "Spike" theme came from looking at screen shots of 'Diablo' on google, the "Odyssey" theme came to me after my roommate whipped out his N64 and we spent an entire night playing Star Wars Pod Racer.
So, in reality I just wrote when I got really inspired (and at random moments). Once I started working for Arcen full time, and I could really methodically dedicate my time to the composition and not have to work on the music on GarageBand after a long day of work, I started growing a lot in my approach to the composition. I still am I think. I'm only 26 years old, and some of the people who have criticized my music are comparing it to works of people who have been in the field for years and are much older than me. My boss and good friend Chris is super supportive, and always reminds me that I'm only going to get better and better, and that is a good feeling.
Being a full time composer, I throw myself at my music with everything I have now. I have a few more years under my belt, I have much better gear to work with, and I'm actually going back to school at the end of September for a year to get my certificate in Audio Engineering. I'm doing night classes so I can continue to work during the day. But it's all for the love of music, for getting more experience in my field, and so I can continue cranking out goodies for you guys!
