1. Think of epic melody
2. Implement it into DAW
3. Spend 3 hours sitting there doing nothing
4. Add some small minor detail
5. "Alright I am done for the day"
Slight exaggeration but procrastination was my biggest enemy, I imagine a lot of people here struggled with it too.
First thing I did was get a clipboard, and write down the names of critical parts of the story and then some smaller side track names I could add if I wanted to, and decided to focus on the most important tracks to the structure of my story (The opening, the conflict, and the resolution) . I just worked on the musical parts in the first days, adding only minimal or essential effects. Ideas mostly either come from doing improv on a piano or they just come to me. Once inside a DAW, I can then build onto those ideas. Many tracks I would do in bits as I was still finding leitmotifs, but still wanted to have a good foundation for the tone of each track I wanted. I feel it is easier to speed up the process when you learn and familiarize yourself with specific library of sounds, Usually I use soundfonts but I was unsure the legality of those so I ended up using FLEX and SurgeXT for the most part. This caused many time issues for me, but it was also a nice learning experience. One example is, I probably spent a couple of hours looking for a specific tunable "Airy blowing sound" I thought would've sounded nice, I was going through every flute synth I could find, EQing them seeing If I could achieve that sound to then suddenly stumble upon the amazing "Bottle Blow" instrument in the general MIDI library. I felt kind of dumb because many soundfonts feature a bottle blow sound and I didn't even think of the instrument. It was a nice discovery of sounds though, I found a pretty spooky evil dark bass of darkness and despair I might use again. SurgeXT is pretty nice if you like sound design as well, I found myself spending a lot of time slightly tweaking the presets since I am pretty inexperienced with that, but I imagine someone more experienced can achieve a lot through SurgeXT or just any synthesizer. I feel that mixing too early for me can lead to way too many readjustments in things like volume and EQ, or it can leave me unsatisfied with something like the melody sounding way better than everything else, making it difficult to add more. Usually I will leave mixing to once the track is done, or if it is necessary on some instruments. So I ended up doing that in the latter days.
Also for art, I am a pretty bad artist. I found a nice color palette online to use, and then I used a reference for getting the main focus of my art at least somewhat ok. Doing the art I feel is a good thing to do when you get "stuck" on musical ideas, as you can come back to your project completely refreshed while still getting something else out of the way.