All entries are in reverse chronological order with the most recent semester first.
Spring 2021
Steven Eiselen
Steven is a UA alumni who graduated in spring 2020 with his master’s in computer science. He joined us for a talk on his graduate research project, Project Fea, on the capabilities of emotional AI and how his findings could lead to creating truly lifelike virtual people.
Shayna Moon
Shayna is a senior technical project manager at Unity, regularly working with game studio clients to help them implement the latest technologies. She formerly worked as a producer at Santa Monica Studios and worked on the 2018 God of War title, primarily as a producer for the audio team. She joined us for a Q&A on her experiences.
Daniel Kim
Daniel is a sound designer at Riot Games, primarily designing and recording sounds for champion skins in League of Legends. He joined us for a Q&A on his experience, talking about both sound design and tips for breaking into the industry.
Rami Ismail
Rami is one of the most well-known names in the games industry. He is an indie game developer and co-founder of indie studio Vlambeer, known for games like Super Crate Box and Ridiculous Fishing. However he is also well known in the industry for his activism, advocating for underrepresented developers and promoting game dev from developing countries, and for leading the development of free tools like presskit() that enable indie developers to more easily promote their games. He joined us to give a talk on “The Six Shapes of Game Design”, followed by a Q&A.
Drew Castalia
Instructor for the ischool who teaches ISTA 251 - Intro to Game Design and ISTA 451 - Game Development. Drew joined us once again, this time to give a talk about a high level overview of how multiplayer games work, complete with playable examples he created.
Michelle Hill
Michelle has spent over six and a half years at 2K games, on their motion capture team. She is a motion capture specialist and animator, and has held a variety of motion capture roles in her time at the company ranging from capture specialist, production manager, and now currently principal animator. She has worked on games like Mafia 3, NBA2K, and XCOM2. She joined us for a Q&A on her experience.
Charles Connoy
Charles Connoy is the former VP of Global Platform at Sony Entertainment, and has been in the games industry for over a decade, with a very long list of credits to his name. He joined us for a Q&A about his experience and the industry at large.
Fall 2020
Manticore Games
We were joined by two representatives from Manticore Games for a demo of how to create a multiplayer game with the Core Platform.
Cynthia Shlezar
Cynthia is a former Treasurer for our club and graduated from the UA CS program in 2018. She spent the next two years as a Software Engineer at Xbox, and joined us for a Q&A to talk about her experience.
Dan Felder
Dan is a lead designer at EA and has also formerly worked at Blizzard on Hearthstone and Arkham games on Faeria. He gave us a presentation that he also did for EA on game design and a lot of the cognitive science that goes into it, followed by a Q&A.
Erin Reynolds
Erin is a game designer and founder of indie studio Flying Mollusk, best known for biofeedback psychological horror game “Nevermind” about exploring the minds of trauma patients. Erin joined us for a Q&A on her experience and spoke about biofeedback, game design and designing meaningful games, and the challenges of starting an indie studio.
Jeremy Deutsch
Jeremy is a former president of our club, and graduated from the UA CS program in 2017. He has since been working as a front end/web developer, and as the founder of the club’s Twine jams, he joined us to do an interactive Twine demo.
Jeremy Lecus
Jeremy is a technical producer at Cryptic Studios and has over 20 titles under his belt. His work at Cryptic has included titles such as Star Trek Online, D&D Neverwinter and Magic: Legends. He has also formerly been a contract producer for Warner Bros on Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, and a producer and QA Lead at Telltale Games on titles such as the Walking Dead and Minecraft: Story Mode. He joined us for a Q&A on his experiences.
Spring 2020
Drew Castalia
Instructor for the ischool who teaches ISTA 251 - Intro to Game Design and ISTA 451 - Game Development. Drew has done a great deal of freelance work and spoke to us about how to finish projects that you’ve started, and showcased some of the projects he’s worked on.
Fall 2019
Joshua Zimmerman
Professor in the PAH department, he often teaches online gen ed PAH 330 - The Video Game Industry. Professor Zimmerman is a games scholar and spoke to us about the focus of his research on community management in games.
