I work 8 and a half hours a day for my summer job so my main focus was maximizing time while also trying to go to new places with my music and step outside my comfort zone. I was originally planning on doing a more electronic submission (I used to make more electronic music but somehow I ended up switching to more orchestral stuff) but nothing was really sticking so I messed around on guitar and added strings and synths and created the sound that I would end up using. Once I had that sound I wanted it was mostly easy coming up with new tracks. I had a lot of back and forth on whether or not I actually liked them or not, but I'm really happy with the end result.
I spent the first day at work thinking about my idea. Inside my mind, what if you can go inside minds? What if you can go inside god minds? What if gods are basically just people (like greek mythology but less) with guilt that builds up so much it kills them? What if that guilt ends up ripping apart reality after it kills a god? What if certain special people are tasked with entering the god's mind world to alleviate that guilt to prevent it from destroying reality? That was basically my thought process of coming up with the basic story/plot. For the story around the music I wrote, I came up with it while writing the music so I could fit it in how I wanted it to.
Writing the music was mostly straight forward, for the two area themes I pretty much just made/recorded the guitar part, then built around that using strings and synths and other orchestral stuff. I don't really follow a good structure when laying out my music, I just sort of see where the music takes me and add B, C, or A sections when it feels right. I don't plan ahead at all other than "Oh I want to mess around with this synth patch/sample library". For the Boss themes I started out by focusing on SFX and sound design. For "False Sun of Shadow" I really wanted to make something weird and unnatural so I used my fretless jazz bass that I bought recently, distorted it to hell and back, added like three different reverb plugins, then played a bass line and played in between notes when possible (so I guess it's kinda microtonal). Then I duplicated the effect rack and played a melody over it with the same in between note concept. Then I started adding choir to it then thought, "hey why don't I turn this into a Yuka Kitamura-esque dark souls boss theme?", so I switched up the vibe to be more orchestral in the second phase. For "She Who Planted The Flowers", I ran out of power at my house because of a massive storm when I got back from work. This sucked because I couldn't charge my laptop inside and work. So I brought my laptop to my car so I could charge it in there and work. I couldn't bring my midi keyboard in the car so I focused on using samples and sound design instead as the main part of the music. I was making an eerie bell atmosphere and it was very dark and scary in the car because I live in the middle of nowhere in a very foresty area so this was terrifying. Around midnight I decided that I should go to bed and continue working on it the next day when I have power, so I turned on some Casiopea to hype myself up then ran inside. For the last track, "Guilt That Fades Away", it was the last day of the jam and I still had to finish mixing all the music, upload the music to youtube, and make the jam page so I had like 3-4 hours to compose and mix it which resulted in it being a bit rushed but people seemed to like that track though so I'm happy!