Fursan al-Aqsa: The Knights of the Al-Aqsa Mosque News

https://twitter.com/UdkUltimate/status/1451540316582993925

UPDATE 10/22/2021:

ALLAH AKBAR! ALLAH AKBAR! ALLAH AKBAR!

Fursan al-Aqsa is BACK, thanks to help of Allah, thanks to STEAM and thanks to all my suporters!

Hello friends,

The haters could not ban my game because it's political content, but they found a mistake of mine, and sent a DMCA take down notice to Valve. The problem is that image of Telaviv City on the Iron Dome Panel Screen. I did not know that image was copyrighted, so the Israeli company who made that image sent this DMCA take down to Valve, and it is a standard to take the game down temporarily until things are fixed up. I already fixed it up, replaced that image and re-checked all assets to see if there was any other copyrighted material.



I did recompile my game's demo, uploaded to steam and wrote them a Counter DMCA note, explaining what happened, and that I already removed the copyrighted image of my game. Now it is just a question of some days until my game is back on Steam. But for those who have my game on their library, you can right now play the updated demo. And my game's demo is available on itch.io, gamejolt and here on IndieDB aswell, with this new updated build.

I updated this demo with many improvements, like the ability to cancel the Bullet Time effect, an updated Training Mission, and now the Knife Kills work like a charm. Also I added MOD support with some cool mods you can try right now, and I will later on make a tutorial on how to make mods for my game. So the bad was for good.



The MOD 'I can fly' is freaking FUN

Other change I made was to use fictional names for every gun and vehicle of my game, to avoid problems with trademarks. I have never seen a Weapons Manufacturer sue an Indie Developer for using their gun's names on a game, however, my game is a special case, because even Israel State and its politicians want to ban my game. They can't ban my game just because of it's political content, but they will try to find even the smallest mistake of my part and use legal ways to ban my game.



I also added a disclaimer on all my game's trailers in youtube and elsewhere explaining that this is a Work in Progress and many of the assets seen in these videos are placeholder assets which were already replaced for the final game.

This game has trully gone viral, specially in Middle-East. Here I gave a live interview, in Arabic, to one of the biggest broadcast channels of Lebanon and Middle-Eastern region:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Go to 28:00 minutes, when the interview begins.

We talked about the influence games have on youth, and specially the importance of my game Fursan al-Aqsa as a way to make arab youth give importance and attention to the Palestinian Cause and how my game pissed off Israeli Politicians and it's allies.

So thank you and until next update.

In this live I will invite players to play against me some cool split-screen multiplayer matches, to revive the golden era of the 90's shooters.

Join me to watch a complete walkthrough of Fursan al-Aqsa® Demo, on which I will try to complete all the demo missions in live.

Fursan al-Aqsa® is very well optimized and doesn't run under 60fps on current-gen PC's, rather, it can reach up to 300fps depending on the Graphics Card.

The trailers you see here on Steam and on my game's YouTube channel DO NOT represent the game's full graphical quality and performance, simply because my PC is a very old SONY VAIO Notebook from 2009, an Intel Core i5 CPU 2.40 Ghz, 6GB RAM with a very old Geforce 310M with just 512MB DDR3. The game runs on my PC at 30-45fps, however, whenever capturing gameplay (I use the pro-version of Bandicam), the framerate drops to 20-25fps, and I even need to reduce the capture quality to 60, instead of using 100 to be able to capture the gameplay.

As I am working alone, I don't have anyone to do the capture for me, but even then, making a compelling game trailer needs planning, even though the framerate looks a bit choppy, but the trailer's overall montage is very solid and planned on each detail, each clip of these trailers is planned before I run in-game to capture the gameplay as I want, so because this I am afraid other person won't be able to capture the way I want.

However, since now many players are playing my game around the web, so here I am showcasing a very cool gameplay of all the demo's missions, done by a player, with a current-gen PC, showing the game running smoothly at 60fps. I hope you enjoy.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

After listening to many players feedbacks, I realized that not every player nowadays are hardcore players, that the world itself changed a lot in the last 20 years, and also did the gaming world.

We live in a very different times since the days of Goldeneye 007 for the N64, the biggest inspiration for Fursan al-Aqsa. While people back then could take months to beat the game because they were usually stuck with the game until the next time their parents buy them another game, the mass availability of games of all prices on digital storefronts nowadays means that people can just play a different game if something is too hard. In other words, people will also get bored easily if the game is too hard as well, especially if they have plenty of other games waiting for them.

So for this reason I did balance much better the difficulty of the game now. It is easier, but still challenging without being frustrating. I hope to reach now also the casual players who want to try something different, an action game which anyone can enjoy, not only hardcore players.

Here follows the list of changes, which were also added to full game:

1- I improved the post process effect, increasing the image contrast and brightness a bit, so players can see better important gameplay objects, like the security cameras, healthpacks and other pickups;

2- I added a small delay for the enemy soldiers, so it takes some seconds for them to shoot at the player after they spot him;

3- Now the Health Packs restore 25HP of health instead of 15HP;

4- Now each Headshot gives the player 10HP of health;

5- On each mission the player will have a Body Armor to pickup, and it is placed always close to the player entry point of each mission;

6- I reduced a lot the opacity of the on-screen blood whenever the player is injured, so it does not distract the player anymore;

7- Now to perform the knife kills is a bit easier, but you still need to get close enough to the enemy;

8- I made the security cameras range less unfair to the players, specially that one close to the corridor under stairs;

Now I am sure the game is much more enjoyable, without losing it's challenging aspect, but at the same time without being unfair for the players, neither frustrating.

I hope you enjoy it, Insha Allah.

Assalamu Alaykum - May the peace be with you.