Welcome recruits!

Hop onto the newest Among Us map – the Airship! Out now on all platforms, work together on this airship to carry out the greatest plan... though whether that’s as a Crewmate or Impostor is another question.

• The 4th map, and the biggest one yet
  
• New tasks including jewel polishing, emptying trash (wow fun), and more
  
• The ability to pick the room you start in
  
• All new areas to explore (or get murdered in)
  
• Improved mobility with ladders and moving platforms
  
• New free hats including a heart pin, angry eyebrows, unicorn head, udder, and more!
  
• Inspired by our other game, The Henry Stickmin Collection

Furthermore, an all-new Airship Skin Bundle is available for purchase! Check it out here and get fancy new gear to impress all your friends and enemies. Each new outfit in this bundle comes with its own custom kill animation! Not that you’ll need it. Since you’re not an Impostor... right? Right??



If you saw our dev log last week, you’ll know we have a new Code of Conduct and Account system. Please take the time to read through the Code of Conduct as you’ll be subject to them even if you claim you haven’t read it.

Here’s a recap on what the account system is all about, you can read the full explanation here:

• Right now it’s focused on reporting and moderation capabilities, but in the future we hope to add a friend system and the ability to transfer your cosmetics between devices.
  
• You can only make on account per device - if multiple people are using the same device it'll be locked for the time being, but we're planning a hot fix for that soon.
  
• You will be able to report if someone in the game is acting inappropriately, including: inappropriate names, inappropriate chat, cheating/hacking, and harassment/misconduct. Consequences can range from temporary to permanent bans (including alternate accounts).
  
• You must create an account to access free chat (without it you will have to use Quick Chat for safety!) and to change your display name freely.
  
• If you are under the minimum age of digital consent in your country (for most countries 13 is the minimum age), you have to get a parent/guardian's permission to access free chat (which then allows you to create an account), or change your display name.
  
• Without an account (or if you're a minor who doesn't want to ask your parent/guardian for approval), you can still play via Guest Mode. This locks you to Quick Chat and doesn't allow you to change your name other than with a randomly generated name.

We’re still working on a number of measures to keep our game as safe as possible! This is just the beginning!

Provided everything goes well and there aren’t massive bugs we need to handle from the Airship launch, we’ve got lots on our plate in terms of future plans! With our 2 new recent programmer hires we're definitely on track for faster work. We’ll make a public roadmap at some point, but for now, here’s what’s on the table:

• A full art style revamp! Puffballs has completely updated the art style with cleaner lines and an easier animation process. Can’t wait for you to see that soon!
  
• We’re aiming to create larger lobby sizes so you can play with up to 15 players. Considering The Airship’s size, we hope this will be a fun way to gather with even more of your friends.
  
• More frequent, transparent updates from us! One of our big goals is to just show you the development process, what goes on behind-the-scenes, and for you grow with us. We’ve learned so much and don’t want to hide anything from you when it comes to this stuff. It’s weird!

You’ve come so far with us, and we can’t wait to keep working on the game for you. You in? Cool! Spread the word and we can’t wait to see you in the game.

Cheers,

Victoria and the Innersloth Team

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AmongUsGame
TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@amongus
Discord: http://discord.gg/innersloth

One more week until the new map drops, Crewmates!

I wanted to jump in and quickly explain the account system that'll be launching with the map, since I'm going to assume once the update launches very few people are going to read the dev log, lol.

Right now accounts are focused on reporting and moderation capabilities, but in the future we hope to add a friend system and the ability to transfer your cosmetics between devices. Cool? Cool!

• You will be able to report if someone in the game is acting inappropriately, including: inappropriate names, inappropriate chat, cheating/hacking, and harassment/misconduct. Consequences can range from temporary to permanent bans (including alternate accounts).
  
• ​Note that reports will be read by people (not bots!) and you will need to provide a reason as to why you are reporting.
  
• No linking of multiple accounts yet (Steam account is only on Steam, mobile on mobile, etc.) It’ll be coming soon though.
  
• You must create an account to access free chat (without it you will have to use Quick Chat for safety!)
  
• You must create an account to freely change your display name. If you do not create an account, there will be randomized names you can choose from.
  
• Usernames are not exclusive. Multiple people can have the same username. (So if you take the username "PuffballsUnited", other people can still use "PuffballsUnited".)
  
• If you are under the minimum age of digital consent in your country (for most countries 13 is the minimum age), you have to get a parent/guardian's permission to access free chat (which then allows you to create an account), or change your display name.
  
• Without an account (or if you're a minor who doesn't want to ask your parent/guardian for approval), you can still play via Guest Mode. This locks you to Quick Chat and doesn't allow you to change your name other than with a randomly generated name.
  
• A corresponding Code of Conduct will be available on our website that outlines the expectations for our community and consequences.

The launch of an age gate, Quick Chat and an accounts system that requires children to obtain a parent/guardian's permission to use free chat or change their display names are all our initial efforts towards making it more safe for children to play Among Us, and comply with various global requirements in the process. Thanks for sticking with us!

We showed off two of the new, free hats that'll be coming with the Airship update. Angry eyebrows and Unicorn hat!

There are still a few more to show off on Twitter as we lead up to the map drop.



There will also be an Airship Skin Pack you can buy along with the game. It'll include 3 new skins (one of which has a custom kill animation) and 13 new hats! You've probably spotted quite a few of them in the opening to the Airship's trailer.



See you in a week! Pray our servers don't die haha agh.

Cheers,

Victoria and the Innersloth team

Hi Crewmates!

We know people have been excited and waiting for the map – thank you to those who have been SO supportive and understanding. It’s really helped us out mentally these past few months.




This free update will have all new tasks, the ability to pick the room you start in, ladders, a basic account system for moderation and... more?! (Some new free hats as thanks for being so patient with us perhaps?! 👀)



In an effort to continue being as transparent as possible with our process, we wanted to share exactly what we’ve been doing and why things have taken longer than we wanted.

Let’s get started!


I’m going to try and do my best to explain everything in as few words as possible, but please remember there’s a lot of nuance to any and all situations!

Why did we not release a map ASAP?
I explained this a bit in our last dev log, but Among Us’ popularity was something no one expected, and quite late into 2020 too. (Thank you for that!!) We had already considered the game done and had moved onto something else. And while it may seem odd things took a few months, it’s quite normal in game development, especially for a team of our size. When you work in an official capacity and need to handle various business needs, there are more legal considerations that need to be put into it versus if it were just a side project or mod!

Additionally, creating a map and updates isn’t as simple as creating one aspect of the game and throwing it onto the PC. Because our game is cross-platform, it means EVERYTHING needs to work on as many devices as possible. (Every kind of smartphone and its various versions, console, etc.) You may have noticed most modifications to the game focus on just PC, as that makes development much easier.

When a game becomes unexpectedly popular it’s great, but it brings a whole slew of other problems we were extremely new to, which I’ll outline below. That being said, we're extremely grateful for all of the success we’ve found. The explanation of problems is just that – an explanation! Not a complaint. Thank you for letting us be a part of your lives. 😊

Maintenance
Multiplayer online games have a lot that goes into them – especially one with as many players as Among Us. Time gets taken away from other tasks because we’ll need to put out a fire somewhere else e.g. when servers go down, we get reports of hackers, etc. Because it means it often affects millions of players, these are high priority items we need to immediately switch to fixing. The more people playing, the more things can go wrong sometimes!

Hiring
Why not just hire a ton of people? Well, for one we want to keep our close studio dynamics – the bigger the group, the more problems you run into with management, interpersonal clashes, and just overall coziness! If you’ve worked on a group project, you know having more people isn’t always necessarily a good thing. And it also matters WHO those people are.

Plus, when you're a smaller team, hiring is a very distracting process. For example – if Forest, our one programmer at the time, has to be taken away from work on the map to sort through hundreds of resumes, interview a ton of programmers, and set up their employee onboarding, it takes up weeks and weeks of work AND 100% of our programming power.

Finally, we don’t want to treat our team members poorly. Properly setting up insurance, vacation, onboarding, etc. Taking care of people is the priority, always! Right now we're a team of 5 and we hope to continue staying pretty small and cozy, but there are some new hires on the way too.

That being said, we did bring on outside groups to help. It helped the servers stabilize when we moved to Multiplay. Play Everyware made getting Switch out in three months possible. Dual Wield handles all the merch. Legal and accounting and HR are all new partnerships that reduced the burden of running Innersloth. But these all have a different feel than hires who are going to shape the way Among Us and Innersloth work in the years to come.

Daily business. So. Many. Meetings.
The thing about being a studio and a ~corporate entity~ is that we actually aren’t able to slap together things and release them without thinking of several other affecting factors now. (Even small updates!) It was easier when we were just a group of 3 and there weren’t really many demands of us, but now things have changed and we need to follow a more rigid process since sooo many other people are involved. Include the fact these things often require meetings that take hours, multiple times during a week, and that for a while our one programmer was also doing all the non-game/business stuff meant a lot.

You also may have noticed how much fake Among Us merch has been out there. We had to get legal help for that, but the way IP laws work is that the only ones with the power to talk to lawyers and have things taken down are Innersloth officially. That definitely groups into the sheer amount of meetings we have, and the considerations we need to make. We want to encourage fan art and totally welcome it! But we don’t want corporations taking advantage or ripping off anyone.

Honestly we’re also a bit tired! Since Among Us blew up so late in 2020, it meant we weren't able to take a proper winter holiday, and sometimes we can end up working quite late handling things. This isn’t something to be proud of at all, especially since the games industry often has a problem with crunch that we want to avoid. But we’re trying to be transparent with you, and we want to be better about this.


Programming tasks
All things considered, programming was one of the easier parts. (You’ll see why when you read further along.) We've already made three maps, so if all we had to do was make a map for PC and mobile and release it, we might have finished it last year. But it wasn't going to be as good as we wanted and it would have messed with the Switch launch, so we hard stopped to improve Switch launch.

Approvals
Now that we’re on (and coming to more) consoles, there is an actual approval process we have to go through with them. We can't just put out an update in two days anymore!

Accounts & Priorities
The most important thing for us when Among Us blew up was to ensure safety, moderation, and reporting. We consider it our responsibility to create a positive, healthy community. Thank you to our community for being excellent to each other in games! That being said, we were very much aware that there was still a moderation problem we needed to tackle, and that became our priority.

A proper moderation system is one that is extremely difficult and time consuming. It is not as easy as just having a “report” button and having an algorithm ban someone after a certain number of reports. There is a lot to consider:

• Servers that accounts are hosted on: Accounts need to be hosted on servers. What servers, and where? How do you ensure they are safe so your accounts don’t get hacked?
  
• Privacy: Do your terms of service for accounts follow privacy guidelines? Are they respectful of personal information?
  
• Legal: Are accounts complying with laws from all around the globe?
  
• Moderation: What should be able to be reported? How much is handled by algorithms? When it comes to moderation there is often A LOT of nuance. When should things be sent to a human? How can you prevent false reports?
  
• Programming: Well. Someone has to make this system happen!
  
• Because of these considerations (and more!), accounts ended up taking longer than expected. It MIGHT’VE been possible to launch The Airship before accounts, but we didn’t want to do that. It would be wrong to launch the new map, get all hyped, and pretend like there were no issues with toxicity. So these two things needed to launch together.

Bugs/Quality
While the map was finished, it had some completely unacceptable bugs. We wanted to make sure we fixed the biggest ones (that we could find, at least). And keep in mind each platform has its own unique bugs!

Whew. Did you actually read that all? Proud of you! I hope that helped understand our situation a little better, and also show you WHY we’re so so grateful to everyone for being extremely patient with us as we learned all of this. We never want to hide anything from you when you’ve shown us so much support. So when this map finally launches... we really hope you love it, and we’ll continue doing our best for you!

Cheers,

Victoria & the Innersloth team

---
Social Links
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AmongUsGame
TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@amongus
Discord: http://discord.gg/innersloth

Hey Crewmates!

We've been working on fixes over the weekend for the game, sorry about for the issues! Whew.

Version 2021.3.5 updates includes fixes for:

• Blank screen when creating a new room
  
• Players unable to find any lobbies in the public list
  
• Age gate for Quickchat is 13+
  
• Black screen in lobbies and creating games
  
• Desync issues should be fixed when everyone in the game is updated to the latest version. However we're waiting on approval from the store for iOS, so there may be some people in public lobbies that still have the old version.

We're still aware of visual bugs, clipping, and other gameplay bugs. Super appreciate the patience and support as we get these sabatoges fixed. :)



- Victoria

Hey Crewmates, small feature update!

We've just added Quickchat (version 2021.2.21) - this is an easier, faster and safer option to play if you're using text chat! There will still be an options for free chat (toggle it On/Off in Settings), and if you're under the legal age limit you'll have Quickchat for you.



I know you're waiting for the big update news too. Sorry it's been so quiet on our end, we've been focused and working on getting things to you. In trhe future we'll definitely make sure to get you more regular dev updates.

The ball is rolling, promise I'll get you more info when I can!

Cheers,
Victoria

--

Minor update: We're highly aware that a lot of things are broken and we are very hard at work trying to put out these fires! We're also working on fixing the age gate to 13. We'd appreciate your patience as we work on fixing this update!

Hellllo Crewmates (...and Impostors...)!

Whew, it’s been awhile since our last dev log huh? Happy 2021! Here’s a giant dev log update, a wrap up, and mini roadmap for the time ahead. All strapped in? Then let’s goooo!

• New map coming early 2021 – watch the trailer here. As we revealed at the Game Awards on Dec 10th, the new Airship map will be dropping in early 2021! Inspired by our other game The Henry Stickmin Collection, this will be a huge map with all new tasks and rooms to explore. Choose which room you start in, run around in new costumes, and even climb up and down ladders?! Crewmate technology has advanced so much, wow. And yes – the update will be free!

• The Game Awards. We walked away with the Best Multiplayer and Best Mobile awards?! Thank you SO much for all of the support... never in a million years did we expect this, but you crewmates made it all happen! So surreal. We’re dedicated to making the game better and better for you!
  
• 1 million! We hit 1 million followers on both Twitter and TikTok?? Dang, that’s a lot of beans!

• 2021 roadmap. Now that we've wrapped up a lot of stuff for the holidays, we're looking to be more transparent about what we're launching and the expected order by making a public roadmap. It won't have dates until we know we can hit them, but it'll be a place to find out what to look forward to first! More on that soon.
  
• Hiring? We’ve heard all the questions – why don’t you just hire more people so development can go faster? We wish it were that easy! Adding more people doesn’t automatically make development go faster – it slows it down and can cause a ton of issues if we don’t do it properly (and in the worst cases, when finances aren’t handled properly, it can actually end up closing a studio completely. Many indie studios have faced this problem, sadly.) Hiring, training, onboarding, possible interpersonal disputes, artistic differences, code legibility, legal/privacy concerns, and an infinite number of other problems can arise. We never expected all of this to happen (thank you!!!), so we’re taking it slow and steady to make sure we can keep sending good things your way. But we have things in the works!
  
• Accounts. We wanted to launch this earlier, and we're close, but we want to make sure it isn’t half-baked before implementing. (Trust me - you do not want a bad reporting system with no accountability behind it.) The first update for this is primarily focused on moderation - as stated in the previous dev log - and we’re hoping to get this out ASAP. This is a small step towards ensuring everyone playing the game has a safe and welcoming experience! Don’t worry, we’ve heard all your requests for things like a friend system, saved stats, and so on, but for now this will be the first thing available.

• Among Us gained incredible traction pretty late into 2020 that we weren’t expecting, and that meant A LOT of change for us. Not to dive into too much organizational stuff, but not only did we need to switch back to working on Among Us after thinking it was done, but we also needed to set ourselves up more sustainably to work on the game. We had to spend 2 months just restructuring, figuring out new processes, and getting external partners to help us manage on board. Originally it was just 3 friends working together (and now I'm here to make 4, hi), but if we wanted this to work long term and hire up, we needed to streamline things. It’s all behind the scenes work, and while it meant time away from the game, it’ll make it easier for current and future us to develop the game better. Not to mention additional platforms (like Nintendo Switch and Xbox) means more support, certifications to go through, and whatnot. We have help from our porting partners for that, but it still means we need to make sure future things we do are supported on those platforms. There’s a ton of other things out of our control (legal issues, meetings, planning), so sometimes these things take longer as well.
  
• Thank you SO much for the patience as you wait for the next big update! We want to do more for you to show you how grateful we are, but without sacrificing on the quality and values we had before this blew up.

2020 was a rough year for everyone, but thank you for surprising and delighting us in spite of it all.

Seeing all the fan art and messages about how Among Us has helped you connect with your friends and family (or helped you make new ones) is something we don’t take for granted. We’re happy to have you be a part of our community.

Can’t wait for you to see what we have planned for 2021!

- Victoria & the Innersloth team

Hey all, Victoria here! As a quick introduction, I’m the new Community Director at Innersloth (bringing us to a grand total of 4 people on the team), which means you’ll probably be hearing from me a lot more from now on.

December is shaping up to be an extremely busy month getting a bunch of things to you. So let’s dive right into the dev log for v2020.11.17!

• Awards. We’re nominated for TWO awards for The Game Awards – Best Multiplayer and Best Mobile Game. We’re seriously all blown away by everyone who has gathered around our game and are honored to even be nominated. You can vote for us to win here.
  
• New map peek. We launched an official Among Us Twitter with a sneak peek at the new map! Give it a follow if you want to hear the latest, but we’ll be sure to keep our community updated wherever they are.
  
• Merch. The official Among Us merch store has launched! Now you can sabotag—er, I mean, fix spaceships in true crewmate style.

• Comms sabotage hides task arrows
  
• Comms red light no longer immediately responds to the correct position

• Fixed camera flinging on security cams
  
• Fixed inaccurate admin table on Polus
  
• Fixed Polus panels reachable through walls
  
• Fix solo-complete reactor/seismic exploit
  
• Fix align engine exploit and softlock

• Accounts. One of our biggest priorities has been to get our account system nailed down and in line with privacy policies. The first focus for accounts will be to get reporting and moderation integrated ASAP. We want our game and communities to be welcoming, respectful places, so this will be a first step in tackling the toxicity and hacking. Thank you for being excellent to each other in the meantime! If you have any issues, you can send reports to support@innersloth.com.
  
• Languages. We’ve been getting the game localized so Among Us can be enjoyed anywhere! Currently, the plan will be to get these languages in: French, Italian, German, Spanish EU and LA, Dutch, Russian, BR and EU Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino (Bisaya). There will be more to come, but as we said, accounts first!

Whew, did you read all that? Good, because you’ll be tested on it in the next dev log (joking). There’s going to be quite a bit of news in December, so make sure you keep an eye out on our Twitter or Discord!

And, as always, thank you for all of the support.

- Victoria

Hello! It’s been pretty crazy for us here at Innersloth. Lots of things happening behind the scenes. We’ve got a small update here for you all.

Firstly, we want to be sure to talk about the cheating and hacking going on. It was pretty bad there for a bit, so Forte pushed out server changes really fast. They seemed to help a lot, but some cheats still work and now there are bugs too. There will be more server updates to fix all of this, but rushing anti-hacks is what caused the bugs, so cleaning things up is a slower process. Also rest assured that any threats made in the game are false and your devices and data are safe. If you see a hacker, ban them or find a different room.

Here's what this update contains:

- Added Anonymous Voting option

All votes appear as grey

- Added Task Bar Modes

Always mode works like normal

Meeting mode only updates the bar during meetings

Invisible mode removes the task bar entirely

- MIRA: Comms sabotage clears the security logs

-Added symbols to fix wires task

-Added cosmetics to meeting screen

-Various bug fixes



We have lots of things planned, but no real official roadmap. We play things pretty loose so we can tackle what we think the game needs most. We also don’t want to promise anything and then not provide it so it’s a scary thing to share. Here are some of the big things we are planning:



-Accounts. We’re hoping to get accounts into the game by December. This will allow players to report accounts that are toxic and/or hacking. They may be a bit barebones at first but things like friendslists will also come at a later date after launch.

-New Map. We’re hard at work on a new map (It’s Henry Stickmin themed!). This map is currently looking bigger than Polus! The map will contain plenty of new tasks and will be available for free to all players!

-Translations/Localization. The game is currently only translated into a few languages (and some of those translations are a bit rough). We’re planning on getting professional translations into multiple languages (More than we currently have, not ready to share quite which languages yet). To all the people offering to translate, thanks for reaching out, but we’ve got it under control!

-Colorblind support. This patch contains a first pass on colorblind support. We’ll continue monitoring it to see how it performs.



Mind you this isn’t the full extent of our plans. We’ve got lots of things we’re planning that we’re not quite ready to share yet! Thanks for sticking with us and enjoying the game! We’re going through some growing pains right now, but I am very excited for the future of Among Us!

Hey everyone, PuffballsUnited here! It’s been a very exciting time for us the past few months! We’ve absolutely loved seeing everyone enjoying Among Us! Forte has been working hard to get the servers adjusted to deal with the huge influx of players. Thank you so much for bearing with us through these growing pains. Hopefully we can get started on new content soon! Speaking of new content…



Us devs have had several long discussions about what we want to do with the game. When do we stop working on Among Us 1? What content goes into Among Us 2? The main reason we are shooting for a sequel is because the codebase of Among Us 1 is so outdated and not built to support adding so much new content. However, seeing how many people are enjoying Among Us 1 really makes us want to be able to support the game and take it to the next level. We have decided to cancel Among Us 2 and instead put all our focus into improving Among Us 1. All of the content we had planned for Among Us 2 will instead go into Among Us 1. This is probably the more difficult choice because it means going deep into the core code of the game and reworking several parts of it. We have lots of things planned and we’re excited to bring new content to everyone as you continue to enjoy playing!



Here’s some things that are coming on the horizon:

* Servers. Forte is still working very hard to figure out our server issues. We don’t have an ETA but things should hopefully be getting better and better. This is taking up all development time on his end.

* Colorblind support. It’s something we’ve put off for way too long… We plan on adding other identifiers for players as well as certain color focused tasks (Like wires). This should also open the potential for more colors. In the past we couldn’t add more colors because it became too difficult to tell players apart.

* Friends/Account System. This is something we’ve wanted to do for a long time but just haven’t been able to tackle. For the health of the game going forward we’re going to sink our teeth in and figure it out! This one will definitely take some time.

* A new stage! It is still very early and we have only just begun designing the layout. The theme has been settled on though! The next stage in Among Us is going to be a Henry Stickmin themed location!

We have LOTS of other things planned too, we just need to prioritize and organize all our plans. Stay tuned!

https://store.innersloth.com