Saturday, January 30, 2021

Project Fëa AI talk and upcoming Ren'Py workshop!

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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