Saturday, January 30, 2021

Welcome to week 2, everyone!

We have an EXTREMELY exciting schedule of guest speakers and events this month! To make everyone's lives easier, we'll be adding a talk and event schedule to the sidebar of the website and in the Discord so you can plan ahead for the meetings and events you're interested in attending. :)

This Monday's meeting (February 1st, 5:30 PM MST/AZ Time), we'll be having our first guest speaker of the semester - Steven Eiselen, a former graduate student and TA with the UA Computer Science department. Some of you in the club may remember him! He'll be giving a talk on his graduate research project, Project Fëa: Simulating Personality, Emotions, Social Relations, and Physical / Mental Needs for autonomous Non-Player Characters within video game / computer simulation worlds. The first half of the talk will briefly introduce and discuss 3 different AI models, then discuss some details on how they would be augmented within the greater Fëa system towards possibly creating unprecedented, truly life-like virtual people. The latter half of the talk will be a Q&A. Join us on Twitch, and bring your questions - he will be more than happy to answer them!

On Sunday February 7th, at 2PM MST/AZ time on our Twitch channel, we will be holding our first workshop in a while! To prepare for the Valentine's Ren'Py mini-jam on February 13th, Jade will be hosting a workshop on the basics of the program. You'll be able to give suggestions and follow along as she equips you with the skills to design and program a fully functional visual novel game. Ren'Py is highly recommended for folks who are interested in creating narrative games and/or are new to programming, and for good reason - it's a super easy engine to learn. 

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