This summer, associate professor of game development David Whittinghill hosted three teams of game developers from Saudi Arabia for an intensive, four-week masterclass in Purdue Polytechnic’s Games Innovation Laboratory.
The visit is one of four planned phases of the Saudi GFX program, a cooperative grant program established between Whittinghill, the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh, and the Saudi government. These partners have collaborated on the Saudi GFX with the express goal of cultivating the next generation of game development talent in Saudi Arabia as well as wider Middle Eastern and North African regions.
“It’s a pretty small community of developers in Saudi at the moment, but it’s very active,” said Nasser Almohammadi, the lead narrative designer for the development team making Lazeem, a narrative-heavy resource management game that sees the player attempt to solve the many dilemmas faced by a Saudi sheikh in the 19th century.
The Saudi government has provided direct support to the burgeoning game industry, and the country’s premier universities have only recently spun up game development programs. Some of the students are currently in such programs, while others have finished their degrees in prior years. These more senior team members often bring alternative skill sets to their teams which are no less essential to building out a video game. Such disciplines include writing (in either Arabic or English), data science and visual arts.
Among Saudi GFX’s curriculum requirements is that the games and ideas workshopped this summer will showcase some aspect of Saudi culture or identity. In the case of Lazeem, the game is tied to the team’s reinterpretation of Saudi history. The two other teams are working on Noemi and Moya. Noemi leans into the beauty of Saudi Arabian natural settings, and Moya evokes the nostalgia of popular games played by Saudi children like freeze tag.
The Noemi team is creating a first-person perspective game with a cat protagonist, set in the stunning and diverse Neom region. "Can you imagine somewhere in Saudi Arabia—it snows there, there's lakes, and there's the desert. It has everything," music composer Reema Alotaibi explained. "It's not something the rest of the world would imagine when you think of Saudi Arabia. That's such a fascinating story to be able to tell and show the world."
Moya’s designers are from a number of different communities in Saudi Arabia, and the Saudi GFX program therefore provided a chance to have uninterrupted in-person contact in a learning environment for weeks at a time. "Since we're all here in America together, it's a lot easier to get work going," said Faisal Almusharaf, Moya’s sound engineer. "We live in different parts of Saudi, so it's really hard to connect together... being physically here just makes work more efficient."
The in-person component was also crucial for Whittinghill, and “getting everyone plane tickets, getting the teams here” was a feature of the program that was not up for debate, as far he was concerned.
“I want those accidental conversations that only really happen when you’re in a room together,” Whittinghill said. “My experience is that a dev team’s access to resources or money is at maximum about half the battle. The other half, the other thing that determines whether you’re going to make something successful is really just, ‘do we work well together?’ And you kind of need to work on problems in one space, at the same time, to figure that out.”
Noemi’s creators are all based in the capital city of Riyadh, and planned to take full advantage of the great roster of guest speakers that Whittinghill had organized for the groups to meet.
“We were able to meet Scott [Rogers] today, which is so cool,” said Melisa Cetinalp, the conceptual and 3D artist for Noemi. “He worked on the original God of War trilogy, he’s consulted for some absolutely huge game companies. Just getting to hear about these peoples’ stories is pretty amazing.”
At the start of 2025, the three teams had to pitch their game concepts, and show at least a high-level overview of the design, to a judges panel consisting of both American and Saudi experts. Now that they have passed this phase, they are spending their time at Purdue to intensively work on their original game ideas.
The program's focus is on the practical and professional aspects of the industry, including teamwork, monetization, and market realities, with the final goal of either releasing a finished game or creating a "vertical slice" publisher pitch.
“The publishing situation in Saudi is unique, because they’re trying to attract new publishers and part of that means funding development directly—as in, there’s direct government support for games,” Noemi’s lead developer Deniz Cetinalp said. “It's one of a few places in the world where you can be very ambitious and there's support to back it up.”
The weeks after Scott Rogers’ visit also promised a full roster of industry veterans, such as Larry Colvin and John Szeder from Riot Games and Zynga respectively (Riot of League of Legends and Valorant fame, and Zynga the mobile gaming juggernaut with games including Farmville and Words with Friends). All three teams have plans for development to proceed apace between the many hours of collaboration and the opportunities to consult with experts ahead of them.
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