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:
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Project and team management
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GitHub
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Trello
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Itch page
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Gameplay design
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Programming
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Player controlled interactables
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NPC management
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Art implementation
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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.