I am developing a game about Palestine Resistance

Assalamu Alaykum (Peace be with you)

My name is Nidal Nijm, I am Brazillian Muslim, from Arab ascendance, my father is from Palestine.

I am just an indie solo developer trying to find my place in the game industry.

I am well known on the homebrew PS3 community. Just search on google UDK Ultimate Engine 

Summarizing, some years ago I did port UDK Engine (the free version of Unreal Engine 3) from EPIC Games to PS3 and Xbox360 creating the first and only Fully 3D Engine for developing homebrew games for PS3 and Xbox360. This project stayed online for almost 3 years, it got a lot of visibility, millions of download, untill recently EPIC Games got aware of this project and asked me to take it down, because it breaks their EULA and Copyrights.

So I did take down this project, and did apologize for EPIC Games, because I never intended to harm them in anyway. EPIC Games were so kind with me, they recognized my efforts and talent on porting their engine for home consoles by myself, and allowed me to keep using my modified version of their engine, they gave me a Unreal Engine 3 License, I signed with them a contract, and now I am developing my first comercial game.

I even created a very fun and free mini game recently, for PC, PS3 and Xbox360, using my modified version of UDK Engine. Search on google Gears of Kombat

The download links are on the video description on my YouTube Channel.

So now with a Commercial License for using Unreal Engine 3, I decided to develop my first commercial game, a game about the War in Palestine.

I know this theme may be very sensitive for many people, as we all know there are victims on both sides of this war, however, I will try to explain what my game is about, and will show that my game does not promote violence or terrorist propaganda. 

First of all, In this game, the player does not shoot Israeli civilians, women, children, elderly, only soldiers. Also in this game there are NO images of sexual content, illicit drugs, religious desecration, hate of speech against any group, ethnicity or religion, anti-Semitist propaganda against Jews, Nazi propaganda or boasting of any terrorist groups and / or other unlawful acts. This game only contains the virtual representation of the Palestinian Resistance Movement against the Israeli Military Occupation, which is officially recognized by the United Nations (UN).

I want to be clear that my objective in this game is not to make you hate Israel or Love Palestine, I just want to players experience a war game through another perspective. From since I was a Kid I always asked myself why there are no games on which we, Arabs and Muslims, are portraied as heroes, instead of villains and terrorists? And this is true, the representation of Arabs and Muslims in games for a long time was just through the flag of Terrorists, Killers, Assassins, Bandits, and so on. Only recently middle-eastern and muslim characters are portraied as heroes and "cool" characters, like in Street Fighter V, Tekken 7, Overwatch, and others.

Please watch this GDC talk about this matter (I am not allowed to post urls yet):

Added to this, my father was a Fighter of the Palestine Resistance Movement, he fought against Israel Army in the Lebanese Civil War on the 70's, and from since I was a kid, I felt too much proud of my father and the Palestine People in General, because of their Strenght and Constant Resistance. So this game is kinda tribute to the Brave People of Palestine and their Resistance against Military Occupation.

Talking about the game itself, Fursan al-Aqsa - Knights of al-Aqsa Mosque is a Third Person Action Game on which you play as Ahmad al-Ghazzawi, a young Palestinian Student who was unjustly tortured and jailed by Israeli Soldiers for 5 years, had all his family killed by an Israeli Airstrike and now after getting out from the prison he seeks revenge against those who wronged him, killed his family and stolen his homeland.

This game is being developed during the course of 4 years by one person (me, Nidal Nijm), in a custom version of UDK Engine (Unreal Engine 3), using the best technology to tell a compelling story through a game packed with non stop action, advanced 3D graphics and modern gameplay mechanics, however keeping the soul of old school shooters. You will play in missions accross ground, sea and sky, you have many objectives to accomplish in each mission, epic bosses battles, powerful guns, vehicles to drive, helicopters to take down, and much more. Expect a LOT of Action and Adrenaline!!!

This game also is greatly inspired by Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid, Call of Duty Modern Warfare and Insurgency Sandstorm.

I hope untill the end of this month (november) release a free demo of this game (for PC, PS3 and Xbox360), so people can enjoy and feel what my game is about, enjoy the gameplay, feel the action. I plan to make something similar to Metal Gear Solid VR Missions (If you may remember), on which I will teach the player the basis of the Gameplay, like training the player for the true battle that will come on the final game. About the first episode (mission), I hope to release it untill the end of December, beginning of January 2020.

Now I will show you some trailers of the game itself, a beta version of this game. I am already redoing everything from scratch, remaking the models, animations, and maps, raising the overall quality, polishing things here and there, to deliver a high quality product for all people enjoy. 

Also you can see the new updated model for my character protagonist, and the difference between the new player model and the old one, so you all can be sure I am commited to do my best on this game. These old models were just placeholders for me develop the basic game programming framework and features.

You can follow the development of my game here:

As I can't post urls yet, just search on google fursan al-aqsa game to find my game's page on IndieDB. There you can find all informations, screenshots and videos.

Jazakom Allah Khayr (May God give you the best)

Something important I forgot to say.

This map, which will be the first mission (episode) of my game:

It's a remake of a Custom Map for Counter Strike Global Offensive, the map name is de_heat.

Whenever I create my maps, I like to take many games as reference, and I prefer to use Source Engine Games Maps, because it's easy to import on 3dsmax, and use the original map as a reference to model my map over the original map.

I have choosen this map, because it's similar to the real city of "Old Jerusalem", which is where the first mission of my game takes place.

However, I contacted the original author of this map from since I began creating this map in UDK Engine, last year. And he was very kind to me and gave me authorization to remake his map for my game:

However, as I told before, these screenshots of this map, and the gameplay trailers, are a bit outdated, because I am already working on chaing this map a bit, especially changing some assets (props) which are from Valve (the devs of Counter Strike) and not from the map author.

I am replacing these assets with some assets created by me and others purchased on 3D Marketplaces arround the internet. This is very common especially for indie and solo developers, purchase assets, download royalty-free assets to use whenever developing a game.

Imagine if all indies would make games creating all the assets from scratch. You would not see so many indie games arround there.

The same is truth for my new updated protagonist model. This new updated model is a mix of character parts from many models, which I purchased recently to update my 3d models library, which was a bit outdated (the marjority of my old models were from the time of Counter Strike Source).

However, you may think: "Man, getting ready models to create a game is very easy, because you have done almost nothing". I must inform you that the truth is far away for this thought. In game development there is no a "copy and paste", or "plug and play" solution, just one click and your game is done! No, even using pre-made 3d Models, you will never get the model which you want to fit on your project unless you do the dirty work of modifying this asset to fit on your game. Yeah, there is a LOT of work to be done.

I have done a lot of manual changes on this model, in example, the head cover was untill the neck, however I wanted this headcover to raise down untill the chest, so I manually modelled that extra part to make it reach the chest. Also the original texture was a plain black, so I manually created in Photoshop this Shemagh Texture in red color, the traditional Palestine Head Cover. Also to add some more depth, I did bake some small shadows on the texture to make it look more realistic and give a kind of fake volume to this head cover.

Another change I have done, because I am using the default UDK Skeleton (Unreal Tournament 3 Rig), and the default Animation System in UDK Engine (UE3) is pre programmed to work with the UT3 Skeleton outside the box, I did manually rig the character mesh to the UT3 Skeleton, as you can see in the video. And the character arms I used for this model, were a bit larger than the UT3 Skeleton, so I had to manually reduce the arms lenght, thus repositioning the hands aswell, to fit perfectly to UT3 Skeleton (so I don't have to re-program the Animation System).

Cheers and untill next update!

For those who accused my game of terrorist propaganda: I sent the game synopsis alongside gameplay to Brazillian Government Justice Department for Approval and Age Rating. My game was approved, and got Age Rating +18!

IndieDB - Indie Game of the Year. Please vote on Fursan al-Aqsa. Just access my game on IndieDB Fursan al-aqsa game

There just 2 days left for the competition, so if you did not vote yet, please vote now