As a big fan of Half-Life, working on a soundtrack in that universe is extremely exciting. Not only is it challenging trying to work within the confines of the Half-Life universe, but you also have to make sure the music fits the action, for example, gloomy music during an emotional scene, exciting music during a large combat arena, etc. Approaching this is especially difficult when you don't have a background in making soundtracks.
Half-Life is a great series, it may seem slightly dated now, but you must put yourselves in the shoes of someone twenty-something years ago when the games first came out. The main two games were revolutionary and shaped what people thought games could be. Even now, the games are played by many people as they still hold up well, even if they are a little clunky by today's standards. What has kept them alive the most, however, is the modding scene.
Every Valve single-player game that has come out has had work put in so that fans of the games could modify them and use them to make their own experiences in their respective universe or even outside of them. In 2003 during Half-Life 2's development, a hacker named Axel Gembe leaked a large portion of unfinished game data: levels, sounds, textures, you name it, it was probably leaked. This lead to a whole scene of developers making restorations and recreations of the beta material, RTBR happens to be one of them.
RTBR interested me as it has a large team of highly skilled developers and hobbyists working on making a full version playable from start to finish. I had played one of the first divisions of it, 1.1 to be exact. It was a good mixture between the beta content and more original material. It interested me enough to keep up to date with the development, which eventually leads me to post some Half-Life style music I had made for a project which I ultimately never released. I guess fate was on my side that day as project leader David Driver Gomm [aka Kralich] approached me asking if I wanted to work on the mod, to which I said yes.
Until I joined the RTBR team, I hadn't composed for any publically released project. I had to work hard to make sure the music would fit in, especially since I'm not the sole composer. There are two other composers on the team, CW3D and Entity, both of which had made a lot of music before I joined, so I had to make music that would work with their tracks and be unique enough to bring my sound to the table.
Ultimately it's great being able to work on a project like this, it's fun to share my music with fans of Half-Life and also help out with a very unique beta mod.