A game about Palestinian Resistance

[NIDAL_NIJM_GAMES]

Hello friends,

My name is Nidal Nijm, I am a solo game developer from Brazil. I am a long time user of UDK Engine, I have been working on my game in UDK Engine since 2017 (even though the game’s concept began in 2009), I released my game on Steam in April, 18, and, despite the controversial content of my game, it had an AWESOME reception by players, despite some technical flaws of my game, as you can see here on the Accolades Trailer:

Fursan al-Aqsa Steam Summer Sales Trailer

This is the first game I release, and it had been a long journey for me, as I learned a lot of things, from both the game development process and the promotion, marketing, since I have been doing all of this on my own. And as a way to prize the players who supported me by buying my game, I decided to remake this game in Unreal Engine 4, also to release on other Platforms, like Android (a mobile version), Playstation and Xbox (I am a registered Playstation and Xbox Developer).

I have a thread on the legacy forums here about my game:

New PC, PS3 and Xbox360 Game - Fursan al-Aqsa - Knights of al-Aqsa Mosque

https://media.indiedb.com/images/games/1/73/72158/fursan_aqsa_release_banner_2019.png Assalamu Alaykum (Peace be with you) First of all, I would like also to thank my friends here at UDK Engine Forums for all their help and support, specially @O_and_N I would like to thank aswell, my brazillian fellow, ROD Lima, for all his help with Unreal Scripting Programming. He is most know for his Resident Evil 2 Fan Remake in UDK Engine: [Resident Evil 2 Remake -fan UDK proj- Leon B Full Walkth…

But since now I am working on UE4, I decided to make this thread here, just to show off the progress of my game.

No worries, I will just focus on the game itself, the technical part of the game, without commenting about the political content of it, since I know this is a very sensitive matter and may upset some people.

And here follows some of the progress I am making on my game in UE4, mainly the basic gameplay mechanics. By the way, UE4 is simply AMAZING, and the marketplace is a true life and time saver. I am proudly using thousands of assets from the marketplace, for both the gameplay (frameworks) and the level design as this will help me to remake my UDK game in UE4 with less time and less headaches:

Cheers!

[Thorsten09]

Very cool gameplay, i love the old style games without this whole crap you need to think about (maybe just getting old). And i LOVE to see a chainsaw out of good old doom again, looks like fun gamplay and a chainsaw, no more to say.
Ok one thing… i am curios how this turns out in an updated version.

Sometimes i hate to be a german … cant get your game on steam, it is not avaiable in germany

[NIDAL_NIJM_GAMES]

Thanks man for the compliments. Yeah my game is an old school shooter, and whenever I began this project in UDK Engine, the free version of Unreal Engine 3, I did not have too much knowledge on that time, so I ended up using the Unreal Tournament 3 Starter Kit, which comes with UDK. That’s the reason my game has some crazy old school things like dash and double jump.

Unfortunately my game was banned in germany not because the political content, but because the violence, since even some mortal kombat games were banned in germany.

No worries man, send me a DM and I will give you a key of the game, so you can enjoy and have a lot of fun playing it.

But the remake in UE4 I am going to make it more modern, close to Call of Duty Standards, but I will keep the hilarious and comedic violence hahaha

[Get_DOVAH_it]

Assalamu Alaykum, Nidal!

Action! Gore! Chainsaws! Conflict! Over-the-top animations! All things combined to give you that classic war game shoot-'em-up experience! This puts me in the mind of Gears of War.

I cannot think of any games that are based on this side of the conflict, so I can see how this game can be politically controversial. However, as long as you continue to make the game entertaining and not too “serious”, I can see this gaining traction in a remade, upgraded version.

What are the top three things that you would change or improve moving from UDK to UE4?

[NIDAL_NIJM_GAMES]

Masha Allah!

Another muslim brother here on the Unreal Engine Community!

As you said, I tried to make just like Mortal Kombat, hilarious non sense action and gory moments, just for the sake of giving fun for players, since videogame is this, fun and entertainment!

I will keep all the cutscenes, and the game’s narrative and settings, but I can say that the top 3 things to improve are:

1- Gameplay Mechanics
2- Graphics
3- Make the game less hardcore

These are the main things players complained about the UDK Version of the game, and with the help of this AMAZING community, also the Marketplace, I think I can make my game look and feel more modern, close to today’s standards, and not forgetting, I plan to release a mobile version of this game, since the majority of middle-eastern players play on Android.

I have been studying UE4 in the last month, mainly for understanding the differences between UDK and UE4. In the end, I identified many similarities.

In example, the Blueprint Class Object for players, it is kinda a Visual version of the old Unreal Script Classes for UDK Pawn, where it has all the players properties, the skeletal mesh associated, the animations, materials, but instead of lines of code, you can do it directly inside the editor, visually.

Now I understand that UE4 is the natural evolution and improvement of the UE3, and I am happy of being able now to remake my game in UE4.

I have found a lot of hardships while developing in UDK, because the lack of support, tutorials, so many things I wanted to make in the game, I was not able, due the lack of help and tutorials.

Just an example, the stealth kill (knife kills) technique took many months for me to do in UDK, and I just found one UE4 Tutorial to do this in some minutes:

Stealth Takedown Tutorial Unreal Engine

Because this I am sure that in some months I can remake my game in UE4, in sha Allah.

Jazak Allah khayr brother!

[Thorsten09]

Yeah i allready start to worry about what i am going to do with my game. Feelt like they are now more open for gore. The moved a lot of gory games from there index list. But if i hear this again i am really not sure about what i am doing.
There was a time they really talked about to put “Tom & Jerry” to this index list, germans are crazy hehe.
And thank you for the offer.

[NIDAL_NIJM_GAMES]

I was outdated in regards of 3D Art in general terms. Now that I discovered Autodesk Arnold in 3dsMax, I will never work without Physically Based Rendering (PBR), also because Unreal Engine 4 uses this new shader system. This is the FPS Arms Model for Fursan al-Aqsa Game Remake. The model itself is from the Unreal Engine Marketplace, but I made some slight changes on it, specially the textures. By the way, for the promotional art assets of my game, like banners, wallpapers, the game cover art, the website art assets, and so on, I render them in 3dsmax and export as transparent png (promo render). I like to do this way, just like how games were made in past, they always used a higher quality model for the promotional renders. This gives me that nostalgic feel

[Thorsten09]

Yeah higher models are always used if you start, you then can just bake the normals. This is very nice if you use something like ZBrush and Substance Painter to finish the details.

But just wondering why you use UE 4 if you start a new project.
I just moved over to UE 5 without many problems, and as far i can say till now it is almost the same. If you are into c++ the framework also did not change much.

[NIDAL_NIJM_GAMES]

To be sincere bro, I still prefeer UE4, because I think it is more stable and there are many Marketplace Assets (mainly blueprints) do not work flawlessly in UE5. Also the majority of tutorials now are for UE4. I think UE4 is on it’s top of stability with 4.27. I may naturally move to UE5 for a later project, in sha Allah (God’s willing).

I suffered a lot with UE3, because the lack of tutorials, and now I think almost 90% of the tutorials are for UE4.

Last but not least, is about the final requirements for players. I think that UE4 games still will require a less powerful PC than UE5 Games (I may be wrong).

[NIDAL_NIJM_GAMES]

And this is the updated Kalashnikov Rifle AK-74 (an evolution of the AK-47), running on all it’s glory in Fursan al-Aqsa Remake in Unreal Engine 4. By the way, this new shader system, PBR (Physically Based Render) makes a HUGE difference in terms of realistic textures:

And here is a fast preview on Android OpenGL ES 3.1:

[Thorsten09]

You make fast progress. Looking really good.

And it is totally understandable to stick with UE4. I thought the same, but it is just to much fun playing around with high res meshes

[NIDAL_NIJM_GAMES]

Thanks man!

Here follows more updates:

I am doing my best to make Fursan al-Aqsa Remake a trully AAA Indie Game! The FPS mode will be full, with animations for all locomotion states, like swimming, climbing, running, melee punch attack, and so on.

[NIDAL_NIJM_GAMES]

Thanks bro for the suggestions. I do not doubt that UDK / UE3 can allow me to do everything I am doing now in UE4. However, I did not move to UE4 just because of the upgraded visuals, but more because the easy of use and fast way to work. I am not a professional programmer, and most of the programming I have done on my game in the UDK Version, in unreal script, was basically change the default UTGame classes in unreal scripting. But with the UE4 Blueprints and the Unreal Engine Marketplace, I can do in some hours some things which took for me days and days in UDK. Also the lack of tutorials and samples in UDK is what motivated me to move to UE4. There are many things I did want to do in my game in UDK but I was not able due my lack of enough skills in Unreal Scripting and due the lack of support, help and tutorials.

In example, the knife kills (stealth kill) I made in UDK took me many months to get it working. I found a youtube tutorial that let’s you do this in UE4 in 15 minutes!

I consider my skills in game development as intermediate, and to be able to make a high quality game in UDK you need to have a deep knowledge with unreal scripting, and also Action Script (Flash/Scaleform) for the game’s interface. I see you can easily make a complete working game options menu in UE4 inside the editor, while in UDK you need to make it in Flash, and program in unreal scripting and action scripting.

Last but not least, is that I want to release this new version of my game on Android (Mobile version), and because all these reasons I decided to move to UE4.

About the game itself, no, I will make everything in UE4, I will just keep the game’s narrative, the cutscenes and the mission objectives, but I will make completely new maps, so players will have a fresh experience.

About the gameplay, steam players love more the missions which are focused on open combat, they did not like the stealth missions too much, so because this I will make this Remake more action focused, I will add much more enemies on each mission, so players will experience more tense battles.

I am using the FPS Game Starter Kit Framework from the marketplace (FPS Game Starter Kit in Blueprints - UE Marketplace) as the base game’s structure, but I am making a lot of modifications, both on the blueprints and animations, because I don’t want to lose my game’s soul.

There are a lot of more advanced frameworks on the marketplace, but I think this one is the more close to what I have done in UDK (Unreal Tournament Style), specially because the mechanic of changing perspectives between FPS and TPS.

But I am happy also because I updated all my 3D Softwares like Autodesk 3dsmax, Maya and Motion Builder. I was very outdated in regards of 3d technologies, specially regarding PBR Shader.

I will be forever thankful to UDK Engine, because I learned a LOT working with UDK since 2014, but life goes on, and we must follow the advance of technology.

Cheers.

P.S: As a way to help me to get habituated to UE4, I even created a custom layout to make it look and feel like the layout I used in UDK Engine

[Thorsten09]

Hi @AntiGravity, short answer. Yes it is also good for indies.

I think UE 5 is also for indies, i tested a lot till now and what i can say so far … Nanite models are good for performance if you use them often as same models with the same material, but you dont have to take care to much about the poly count.
You dont have to go realistic with high details but you still have the benefit of this drawcall thing and of course the Lumen lightning.

The downsite as i have notice while testing. You can get really easy lost and spend to much time to build a model to look as perfect as you can get with Nanite.
And of course the size of the models and textures (more about the 4k texture size).

[NIDAL_NIJM_GAMES]

I plan to move to UE5 in the future, in sha Allah (God’s willing). But for now I stick with UE4.

Updated M4A1 Rifle

And here is the updated M4A1 Assault Rifle.

[NIDAL_NIJM_GAMES]

This is the MOST BASED game protagonist of all times! Ahmad al-Falastini. I decided to do an overhaul of my game’s protagonist for the Remake in UE4, and I am very happy with the results. I did not model this character myself, but I did build up this character using different meshes and body parts from other characters packs I purchased (not from the UE Marketplace, but from Turbosquid, CGTrader and others).

But I had a lot of work to reshape the head cover to fit inside the body mesh (the neck hole), I even had to redo the UVW, because whenever you move some vertices, this can mess up the texture UVW of the character. But with the help of 3dsmax 2020 and it’s updated modelling tools, I think I have done a good job

[Thorsten09]

He looks really cool. I like that the main char is not again some sort of super gi joe in such a game.

[NIDAL_NIJM_GAMES]

Thanks bro. And yeah, I made his skin more brown this time, to look more middle eastern (even though we arabs are of varied skin colors, depending on the location we were borned), and also because it is very cool to have a non blonde blue eyes white skinned hero in games. Look at Deathloop, it has a black man as a protagonist, and this is AWESOME!

[NIDAL_NIJM_GAMES]

Here is our hero, Ahmad al-Falastini, inside Unreal Engine 4

[NIDAL_NIJM_GAMES]