Thanks for such an interesting post idea! Sorry if the post is long, I wanted to explain basically the devlog of my submission in somewhat extensive detail.
(The Idea)
Coming up with ideas for projects and jams has always been the hardest initial step for me, so for a while I was kinda lost on what I wanted to do and just procrastinated (I have a bad habit of procrastinating and only doing stuff in the last few days ;-;). The idea of my OST only came to me after I found myself once again interested in RPG games such as Undertale and OMORI. I definitely knew I wanted my game to be set in an RPG land with a vast array of areas and characters to interact with. So from there, I started listening to a lot of RPG music such as Pokemon and Undertale to really give me a proper idea of how I wanted the tracks to feel and sound. Funny enough, I was actually planning on making the game have psychological horror elements much like OMORI, but I decided not to go through with the idea due to it being very difficult to pull off well and because I wanted the game to feel more uplifting rather than dreadful.
(The Actual Process) - Read this part for how I actually made the tracks
(I'm not that good at composing so my process might be a bit bad lol) Once I was finished listening to my selected reference tracks, I actually started making the tracks. I composed the songs by just playing random chords and melodies into my piano until I thought it sounded interesting enough. I then recorded the MIDI of the piano playing and just continued tweaking it from there. After that I thought about what instruments I wanted to accompany the track and starting placing notes relevant to the chord progression. From there I tweak the mixing and mastering to the best of my abilities.
I started with the first song "The Past is Best Cherished" (Fun fact, the track was originally called "The Past is Best Forgotten" before I dropped the psychological horror. This is also why the track sounds more ominous compared to the rest). From there I started constructing the other tracks. I didn't really have a linear order for which ones I made first, I just did what I felt like making at the time lol.
After around seven songs into the OST I decided to actually list down how many tracks I was planning on making. Like I stated in the first paragraph, I really wanted this to feel like a complete game from start-to-finish and I thought the best way I could achieve that was by creating a lot of (for the most part) unique tracks that are set to be played for different parts of "Dream Land." After some thinking, I decided on 23 tracks in total (it was supposed to be 24 but I had to scratch one due to time constraints). I also wanted to have motifs that play for a specific place or idea such as a motif for the town themes, one for the sheep related tracks, and one for "Yourself," the main antagonist.
(Last Day)
The last day was here and yet I still procrastinated quite a bit lol. I still had around half of the planned songs left to make so I eventually stopped procrastinating and focused completely on finishing the OST. Because of the time limit (and my procrastination), some of the tracks are just repeats of previous tracks with minor changes (perhaps I shouldn't have planned so many tracks lol). Eventually tho, at around 40 mins left including grace period, I completed all the necessary tracks and published my submission on Youtube and itch.io.
(Conclusion)
Although the process may have been a tedious and somewhat draining at times, I still had a lot of fun creating the tracks and I'm pretty happy with what I was able to do with the time I had. This post ended up being a lot longer than I expected, so I thank you so much for reading!
That's all I have to say really, have an amazing day! :D