Arbiter - Annual Recap - 2025

It's January 1st, having been one day shy of a year since my last update. I've been thinking a lot about what this post would look like over the past couple weeks in terms of what I did/didn't want to talk about, but there's one topic I regretfully could never have predicted...

I got hacked.

Nightmare Scenario

My friend Rittzler (who you may know as the creator of Pseudoregalia) reached out to me last week under the premise of catching up. It's been a hot minute since I've talked to him, and as I've been kinda out of the social media sphere as of late, I had no idea what he'd been up to. After some friendly conversation, he mentioned how he was working on a small project with some friends that he wanted me to help test. In my naivete, I agreed.

Unbeknownst to those in control of his account, this was actually a masterful play. You see, Rittz has asked me several times in the past to test out some of his prototypes. The only thing out of the ordinary this time was the rizzless conversation starter of "hey", and the overall quality of what he was making. That being said, the game itself was still a furry platformer, and I mean... looks at Pseudoregalia.

So I took the bait. Against my better judgement, I clicked the link and downloaded the lone, suspicious "furfall.exe". In my defense I did scan it beforehand, but nothing fishy came up. I thought well, this is certainly weird but I'll bite, and proceeded to make the age old mistake of choosing trust over logic. I was in a Discord call with my friends at the time, and as though to ensure I was jinxing myself, I literally uttered the words "Wish me luck!"

...

Yeah.

From there, I was dropped from the call and my Discord and browser immediately shut down. When I reopened Discord, I was pulled into a group chat where my own account was saying all sort of incriminating shit while being screenshot and sent back to me (along with ransom demands). After the initial wave of anxiety washed over me, I immediately closed Discord and called my friends for help, disconnecting myself from the internet shortly afterwards.

Fast forward a few days, and I've since changed all of my passwords, cancelled my cards, froze my accounts, formatted my main drive, reinstalled Windows, and warned as many people as I could. It was the honest to god nightmare scenario you never think can happen to you, but it did. Thankfully in my case, I had a pretty solid support circle who helped me work through it and isolate the damage as much as possible.

As of right now, all of my accounts, with the exception of Discord, seem to be in my control. We're fairly certain the bot works by spreading itself to as many people as possible with the hopes of finding people willing to pay ransom. I'm still working on getting my account back, but in the meantime:

⚠️DO NOT ENGAGE WITH MY DISCORD ACCOUNT⚠️

I've since disabled any integrations on here to prevent people from joining the Arbiter Discord. I'm not sure if I'll make a new server if I get the account back, but I'll be sure to keep you guys posted. It's not like I really used the reward incentives that much anyways.

I won't really know how bad the damage is until/unless I'm able to get the account back, but I think it's a pretty safe bet that the majority of my channels/servers have been nuked. It's a damn shame, but suffice it to say, the lesson was learned.

Update: I'm happy to say I've got the account back! I've re-enabled integrations and tightened up security on my end, so I think we're all good (famous last words). Stay safe out there gamers.

At any rate, how 'bout the rest of the year?

Positive Life Choices

Last January, I made the decision to pull back from doing monthly updates as it was starting to all feel very forced. Sharing what I had worked on each month felt like more of an obligation than a choice, and as I began working on stuff I couldn't really show, the pressure started to get a bit anxiety inducing.

I'd been doing monthly updates all the way from October 2019 to January 2025, so for about five years straight. I'm glad I did it, as it was a useful way for me to journal my progress throughout development, but I don't necessarily think it helped development either (and it certainly didn't speed things up).

I've been working on this game for a long time now—almost a third of my life. Near the end of 2024 I really started to evaluate everything I was doing wrong both in terms of the technical aspects of project management and the more artistic side of making something meaningful. It was a pretty big wake-up call, and it led to me rethinking a lot of the project's visuals and narrative I had planned.

I think for a lot of those years, I'd been using Arbiter primarily as a vessel for learning game development. It's only been in the past year and a half or so that I've really started treating it like a goal-oriented project I wanted to finish. I had a loose idea of how to get there before, but it was unrefined and without real meaningful intent. If I'm being brutally honest with myself, I don't think I really believed in it. But I do now!

One of the big lessons I learned back in 2024 (before this revelation) was actually when I started using Substance Designer. I was a very stuck-in-my-ways back then, so it took a lot for me to start experimenting beyond my comfort zone with a more modern tool. But when I did, it became disgustingly apparent how much better off I was for shedding that pride and improving my workflow. The more I learned, the more that lesson started to bleed into the rest of my life as well.

As we transitioned into 2025, I really started to think about what other changes I could make (both work-wise and personally) to improve my quality of life. I moved on from some personal relationships that weren't really supporting my self-esteem, instead opting to invest my time into those that did. I rewrote the game's script from the ground up, taking a lot of time to properly study the art of storytelling in a way I felt confident in. I started collaborating more directly with my teammates, spending a lot of time communicating the game's new direction to get everyone on the same page. I changed my work and living environments completely, giving myself more room to breathe (it's the first time I've had a proper desk as well as a second monitor). I went cold-turkey on several vices that were holding me back, including drastically reducing how much social media I consumed (which the hackers oddly affirmed, in a way). And lastly, I started practicing digital art more seriously than I ever have in an attempt to help fill the gaps in our team and communicate more effectively with our artists.

Something I noticed during all this is that I actually like the quiet. I missed it. There's a unique form of motivation you get from not showing everything you're working on, and I think it's beneficial both to me and the team. I've already had comments from my art lead saying they're excited to show people what we've been cooking, and I think it's important to fan those flames while you have them.

With that said, I'm actually not going to be showing what we've been working on the past year. I'd rather we just stay focused, keep our heads down, tease a little here and there, and wait to show anything substantial until we're done—no matter how long it takes.

But there is still one thing I'd like to talk about...

Embracing Insanity

This next bit will likely sound like the complete opposite of everything I mentioned, but I promise it's with good reason. As I said earlier, the move over to Substance Designer was really eye-opening for me in a lot of different ways. It was a form of ego death I desperately needed when it came to being willing to change my process when something wasn't working. As I carried that lesson into 2025, one thing that was starting to really grate on me... was Unity itself.

Unity's a great engine, but it's always lacked focus. Its roadmaps are spread thin, its leadership and business practices are ever changing, and it relies heavily on third party assets to fill in its technical gaps. In short, its direction has always felt unclear. They've split their rendering pipeline into three, only to recently say they'll be combining it back into one. They've changed their naming convention several times over (as well as their multiplayer and interface systems). They just do not inspire confidence anymore—especially after the infamous events of 2023.

From the perspective of a developer working in the 3D space, I've often found it rare to see a feature on their roadmap that simply... makes development easier. There's been several quality of life changes over the years for sure, but in general the available tools have largely remained the same. The world-building tools for example haven't really gotten a meaningful update since 2019, and the next update is only "hopefully" slated for the release of Unity 7. It was only as I got deeper into level design in 2023/2024 that I really started to feel these limitations, and often found myself spending more time building tools and getting things to look decent than building the actual world. When we started talking seriously about our narrative and art style overhaul, I got curious...

As a result, I spent a good chunk of 2025 studying Unreal Engine 5. Trust me, I realize how insane this sounds. I'm about eight years into a project and I've decided to switch engines of all things. It's without question the cardinal sin of game development, but if I'm being honest, I think it's a necessary evil.

The way I see it, we're already putting Arbiter through a massive visual overhaul. With that overhaul comes a pretty unanimous desire across the team to really push the game's visuals in a way that does something unique while leaning into its core themes. I started to get really burnt out working on environments in Unity, in part because of my dated process and lack of vision, but also because I simply had to either purchase or build a lot of highly specific tools just to reach feature parity with things UE5 can do by default. It eventually started to mirror the Substance Designer problem with me, where it felt like I was reinventing the wheel unnecessarily, and this feeling was only compounded as I saw more and more developers embracing Unreal.

Don't get me wrong, switching engines is no small feat. No matter how you slice it, even with a lot of transferable knowledge, assets, and skills, it's still an incredible amount of work. But as we're essentially already restarting the game from a visual standpoint, if there was a time to switch, it would be now. I've done quite a lot of experimentation with UE5 at this point, and for the most part, it's got just about everything we need to realize our refined vision. And given how streamlined a lot of that process is for the kind of games we'll be making, I think it's a pretty safe bet that in the long term, it will save us a lot of time that Unity couldn't. But most importantly, it's exciting!

At this point, Unity's become something of an anxiety riddled coin flip for me. Every time I want to do something with it, there's a question of whether or not I even can. Sometimes those limitations can be healthy, as they can help keep your project scope from ballooning. But other times it's just for the most basic shit—things that it really should be able to do by now but for one reason or another, it just can't. Those moments would often snowball into having to spend time creating said tool for myself, or pay for a niche solution provided elsewhere. Sometimes, I had to give up on it entirely.

But when I looked at said feature in Unreal, it truly Just Works™. Things like detail painting on static meshes, compositing animations and effects, advanced spline tools, etc. You'd think these things would be no-brainers, but they're all incredibly rudimentary when you look at their Unity equivalents (or lack thereof). I know Unreal can make the kinds of games we want to make because I've played them—both at the indie and AAA level. There's no real question of what it's capable of both technically and visually, you just have to be willing to learn it.

On top of all that, it was always a long-term goal of mine to switch to Unreal when we wrapped up with Arbiter. Ideally that would have been a lot sooner, but I was unfortunately cursed with a vision. I think we have a genuine chance to make something meaningful here, but I've reached the point where I don't want to be fiddling with uncertainty—I just want to do the work, and UE5 has afforded me that in a way Unity doesn't.

I hope I've made a reasonable case, but believe me, I know it's crazy. I wouldn't do it if I didn't genuinely think it'd be worth it (especially in this "quality of life" arc I find myself in), so I can only really ask for your trust and patience as we switch over. If you can give us that, we'll give you a pretty damn cool action game.

Expectations

As for the future, I probably still won't be posting as much. As I said, I've been enjoying the quiet and I think it's good for both morale and Arbiter as a whole. I've been pretty detached from social media lately (which is something I'd highly recommend), so don't expect too much on that front either. At this stage in development I just want us to keep our heads down, build our game, and reveal it when it's ready. I hope that's understandable.

To all the folks that have supported me through such a silent year, I really can't thank you enough. I see this place as an option for anyone who wants to financially support development costs as we try to get this thing done. I'm sorry for how long it's taken (and the accompanying highs and lows), but your support has really helped keep me afloat over the years and I can't express how much I appreciate it.

I know my word's kind of moot at this point, but there's one last thing I'd like to say. It's been an absolute roller coaster of a year for those of us on the team, but my faith in our new direction has been a constant. We're still in the process of switching engines and finalizing the new visuals, but everything's starting to click together in a way that really feels like we're making something worthwhile. In truth, I think it's no surprise that cleaning up my personal life has coincided with cleaning up development, but it's a hard thing to realize until you're on the other side.

It's not like the journey's over though; there will always be more and more ways to improve your life (such as web safety). I know it's a tough sentiment to hear with the current state of the world, but I'd like to think my situation is just a microcosm of a larger struggle. The more we improve ourselves as people, the more our passions, and thereby the world, will benefit. But the only way I can prove that is by finishing this thing, so wish me luck!

Cheers,
Jordy