العربيةAlready have an account? Sign in

Explore

Pathways in design, games and film — pick yours and start today

Courses you can join

Highlights

Work and conversations the team picked, and what your classmates reacted to this fortnight

Nothing highlighted yet — the first project you post could be here

Read

  1. News

    XP counts the seconds you actually watched

    With the new player you can see exactly what counts and what does not.

    Read more

    With the new player you can see exactly what counts and what does not.

    The rule itself has not changed since day one: the seconds you actually play at 1.5x or slower count. Playing faster than 1.5x, skipping to the end of a lesson, or leaving it running in a background tab adds nothing to your progress.

    What is new is that the player says so while it is happening, instead of you finding out too late. If you have been watching at 2x, those hours did not count — and that should have been visible from the start. The lessons that need rewatching now show on the progress track in the new player.

  2. Stories

    The Unity certification track, and what a certificate actually means

    Our certification track is built on Unity's three certified programmer credentials: Unity Certified User, then Associate, then Professional. The…

    Read more

    Our certification track is built on Unity's three certified programmer credentials: Unity Certified User, then Associate, then Professional. The advanced pathway is designed against the exam objectives themselves rather than a parallel syllabus — programming, UI, debugging, asset management from prefabs through version control, and then the certified-professional outcomes, from optimisation to working inside a software team.

    Two rules we hold to, and say up front: no certificate for partial completion, for any reason whatsoever, and no guarantee of a job. A certificate documents a level you reached; it is not a promise we made.

    Which is why we suggest reading the exam objectives before enrolling rather than after. The exam does not ask whether you watched the lessons. It assumes you have built with your hands: moved between scenes, shipped a WebGL build, fixed a null variable at runtime, and understood the difference between inheritance and an interface before choosing between them.

  3. Industry

    A Saudi studio raises $1.45 million for original PC games

    Majestic Mind Games, based in Jeddah, announced a $1.45 million round co-led by Merak Capital and Impact46, with backing from NEOM. The studio was…

    Source: Wamda

    Read more

    Majestic Mind Games, based in Jeddah, announced a $1.45 million round co-led by Merak Capital and Impact46, with backing from NEOM. The studio was founded in 2023 by Lujain Albukhari and Majed Anbar, and builds original titles aimed at PC first, with selected games expanding to console and mobile later.

    The detail that matters to a student in Amman is not the amount but the team size: a small named core — a lead artist and a programmer — and a bet on original IP rather than outsourcing services.

    This is the pattern repeating across the region right now: small studios, early funding, looking for people who can carry several jobs at a reasonable standard. Which is precisely the opening that suits someone who has finished a whole project with their own hands, because a team of four does not hire for a single skill.

  4. Tips

    Blender: apply scale before the model leaves for the engine

    When you scale an object with S you are not changing the mesh. You are writing a number on the object that says "draw this at twice the size".…

    Read more

    When you scale an object with S you are not changing the mesh. You are writing a number on the object that says "draw this at twice the size". Blender respects that number; an engine sometimes does not. The familiar result is a model that looks correct in Blender and arrives in Unity or Unreal at double size, or with a physics collider that does not match what the eye sees.

    The damage starts before export, too. Bevel measures its width in object units, so a non-uniform scale like (1, 1, 0.4) gives you a thick edge on one axis and a thin one on another. Solidify and cloth simulation behave the same way.

    The habit: before exporting, and before any modifier that depends on distance, select the object and press Object ▸ Apply ▸ Scale, or Ctrl+A ▸ Scale. Then check the item panel with N — scale should read 1.0 on all three axes.

  5. Industry

    Two people, a six-dollar game, 20 million copies in two months

    Meccha Chameleon, a $5.99 multiplayer hide-and-seek game, was released on Steam by two Japanese developers on 10 June 2026 and passed 20 million…

    Source: Inven Global

    Read more

    Meccha Chameleon, a $5.99 multiplayer hide-and-seek game, was released on Steam by two Japanese developers on 10 June 2026 and passed 20 million units sold on 12 August — roughly two months later.

    The details worth more attention than the number: the team is two people, one programmer and one director-artist. The game is built in Unreal Engine and uses Epic Online Services for matchmaking rather than dedicated servers. Development took about two months, because the pair had shipped six Steam games since late 2024 and reused the multiplayer framework they built along the way.

    That is the real shape of an overnight success: not a brilliant idea that appeared from nowhere, but a sixth project by a team that kept shipping and kept learning. The lesson is a practical one — finish the small game and release it, because the scaffolding you build today is what makes the next project possible in two months.

  6. Stories

    From a student project to Technical Artist at Tamatem

    Basil is one of our students. His project "Against ME" is a local multiplayer game in Unity 6 on URP, taking its cue from Indigo Prophecy. He is now…

    Read more

    Basil is one of our students. His project "Against ME" is a local multiplayer game in Unity 6 on URP, taking its cue from Indigo Prophecy. He is now the main Technical Artist at Tamatem, and is preparing for the Certified Professional Artist exam.

    We promise nobody a job, and our terms say so in as many words: we issue a certificate representing the level a student reached, and we do not guarantee employment. What we can say is that the route Basil took is not a secret. One project, finished all the way to the end, on a named render pipeline, with decisions its author can defend in an interview.

    That is the difference between a portfolio that gets read and one that gets scrolled past. Not the number of projects, but having a single one whose author knows why every decision in it was made.

  7. Tips

    Unreal: use IsValid, not a comparison against None

    A reference in Unreal has three states, not two: null, valid, and destroyed-but-still-held. Comparing != None only separates the first from the other…

    Read more

    A reference in Unreal has three states, not two: null, valid, and destroyed-but-still-held. Comparing != None only separates the first from the other two, so the wrong branch runs for an enemy that had Destroy Actor called on it a moment ago, and the crash arrives inside the next function rather than where the mistake is.

    The IsValid node checks both conditions at once, and it is a single node with two execution outputs, which replaces the hand-rolled branch entirely. In C++ it is the same call: if (IsValid(Target)), not if (Target != nullptr).

    The habit worth fixing: any reference you store in a variable across frames — the current target, the last checkpoint, the vehicle you were driving — gets an IsValid check at every use, not at assignment. The moment you stored the reference says nothing about the moment you read it.

  8. Industry

    Blender 5.2 LTS: physics inside Geometry Nodes, and a lighter Cycles

    Blender 5.2 arrived on 14 July 2026 as a Long-Term Support release. The most significant addition is an experimental physics framework inside…

    Source: CG Channel

    Read more

    Blender 5.2 arrived on 14 July 2026 as a Long-Term Support release. The most significant addition is an experimental physics framework inside Geometry Nodes, through an XPBD Solver node, which lets hair and cloth be simulated in the node tree rather than in a separate system.

    Among the practical additions: a Mesh Bevel node, a Thin Wall mode on the Principled BSDF for thin surfaces such as paper, leaves and soap bubbles, and the LoopTools operations folded into core modeling instead of an add-on.

    The feature you will feel first is the Cycles texture cache. Converting textures to .tx files cut memory use in some demo scenes by as much as 80%, at a slight cost in render time. If your machine chokes on a large scene, that is the setting to try before buying a bigger card.

  9. Industry

    The game art job market: only 11% of roles are entry-level

    A monthly analysis of game art job listings counted 1,605 roles posted in June 2026 by 817 studios across more than 40 countries. The numbers are…

    Source: Artblast

    Read more

    A monthly analysis of game art job listings counted 1,605 roles posted in June 2026 by 817 studios across more than 40 countries. The numbers are worth reading slowly: 34% of listings were senior or lead, and only 11% were entry-level or junior.

    By geography, North America came first at 41%, then Europe at 31%, Asia-Pacific at 13%, and the Middle East and Turkey at 8%. Also, 77% of the roles were on-site rather than remote.

    Two things we take from it for our students. First, the entry-level door genuinely is narrow, and a portfolio showing finished work in a named production pipeline is what gets you read inside that 11%. Second, the region's share has room to grow, and the job nearest you is usually at a small studio that advertises rarely — you hear about it through events and through people, not through job boards.

  10. Stories

    Hakaya Emma: Petra, Aqaba and Mount Nebo, built in Unreal Engine 5

    "Hakaya Emma – Bittersweet" was built by a team of our students — Basil, Khaled Omari and Yaman Abu Laban — in Unreal Engine 5, with a stated…

    Read more

    "Hakaya Emma – Bittersweet" was built by a team of our students — Basil, Khaled Omari and Yaman Abu Laban — in Unreal Engine 5, with a stated purpose: to show a player Jordan. Petra, Aqaba and Mount Nebo.

    A project that commits to a real place imposes a discipline that an invented one does not. You cannot make up the sense of scale in the Siq at Petra, and you cannot light Aqaba in the afternoon with a light that is nothing like it. You have to look at reference, and then look again.

    That is exactly the skill studios ask for: matching a visual reference under performance constraints, rather than building whatever comes to mind. It is why we push students towards a location they actually know — the street they live on, if it comes to that — instead of a science-fiction city that nobody can say is wrong.

  11. Tips

    Unity: the editor is the wrong place to measure performance

    Profiler numbers taken inside the editor are not your game's numbers. The editor runs its own loop, loads assets uncompressed, and allocates memory…

    Read more

    Profiler numbers taken inside the editor are not your game's numbers. The editor runs its own loop, loads assets uncompressed, and allocates memory for its own tooling, so the graph shows spikes that vanish entirely in a real build — and a whole evening goes into chasing a cost that does not exist.

    The right way: File ▸ Build Settings, tick Development Build and Autoconnect Profiler, build to the device the game will actually be played on, and attach the Profiler to the running build.

    Before reading any number, open the GC Alloc column and sort by it. Per-frame allocation — a string assembled inside Update, or Physics.RaycastAll returning a fresh array — does not show up as steady slowness. It shows up as a hitch every few seconds when the garbage collector runs, and that hitch is what a player complains about, not your average frame rate.

  12. Tips

    Unity: split the code with asmdef files and stop waiting on compiles

    By default every .cs file in your project lands in one enormous assembly called Assembly-CSharp. Editing any line recompiles all of it, and as the…

    Read more

    By default every .cs file in your project lands in one enormous assembly called Assembly-CSharp. Editing any line recompiles all of it, and as the project grows, changing a single number turns into a twenty-second wait before you can press play again.

    The fix: Assets ▸ Create ▸ Assembly Definition inside each major system folder — movement, UI, saving, AI — then declare what each one needs in Assembly Definition References. After that, a change to the UI compiles the UI.

    There is a benefit better than the speed. Having to declare those references makes your dependencies visible: if you find that the movement system needs a reference to the main-menu assembly, the compiler has just shown you an architectural mistake that was hiding behind a casual using. Start with two or three boundaries rather than ten — over-splitting trades a waiting problem for a references problem.

Sitara