
Jared Nolen
Programmer • Developer • Game Designer • QA Tester
The Autumn Express
Five Person Team | Cozy Autumn Game Jam 2022
September 2022
A cozy game about driving a tram through a serene autumn forest. Meet a cast of woodland characters along your travels. Take them to their stops and chat with them along the way.
​
On Itch here!
On GitHub here!
​
Responsibilities:
I was the project lead and programmer on this project.
My responsibilities included:
-
Project and team management
-
GitHub​
-
Trello
-
Itch page
-
-
Gameplay design
-
Programming
-
Player controlled interactables​
-
NPC management
-
Art implementation
-
​
Recognition:
Ranked #7 in the cozy category, from a total of 380 games.







Tools / Languages Used:
Unity, C#, Visual Studio, GitHub
​
Design Process:
A few months before the jam, while riding the bus back from school, I jotted down the first prototype ideas for this game. A simple relaxing game about driving a tram and maybe meeting interesting characters along the way. When I heard of this jam I knew that idea would be perfect. I asked a few friends if they would be interested in creating it with me and we got started brainstorming.
​
I created a Trello board to organize tasks and we set up meetings every other day to keep on track during the course of the two week jam. I started with prototyping the interactable controls, and once they felt nice I started to give them function and hooked them up to systems my team mates had worked on. From there I moved onto NPC management. Picking up and dropping off NPCs and connecting it to the dialogue system another teammate had finished.
​
Once all the game systems were in place and finished. I made some last polish touches, created some promotional images, and uploaded it to itch.
​
Overall this jam went quite smoothly and turned out well. I had worked with my team members before on Cursed Crops and various other projects. So we were all well acquainted to working as a team.