Among Us: What will the future of the game’s development look like?

Among Us has been one of the most played games of the last few months, and the game’s developers have all been hard at work trying to maintain and add new content to the game for the millions of new players who recently picked up the game. But being just a three person studio, development is slow. Despite this, we should take a look at what the future of Among Us might look like.

How does content get added to Among Us?

Hmm, are you in the EU region? I am seeing some instability there. Other two are okay.If the anti-hack backfires, it should boot you with a "please stop hacking" message, not a plain disconnect/ping message.

— Forest (@forte_bass) October 27, 2020

Among Us is the product of the work of just three individuals, Forest Willard, Amy Liu, and Marcus Bromander. Forest is listed as their programmer, Marcus is listed as the artist, animator, and game designer, and Amy as the other artist and “general task-doer” of the company.

These three are the only official developers for Among Us, although the game has a rapidly growing modding community as well. As you might expect, with just a three person development team progress moves fairly slowly, although this problem is somewhat mitigated thanks to Among Us having a very high degree of replayability.

Map 4 is looking to be bigger than Polus.

— Puff (@PuffballsUnited) October 26, 2020

The exact order in which new content gets worked on will also change greatly based on what exactly is needed. For example, the latest wave of hacking plaguing Among Us has been handled almost solely by Forest due to the nature of the problem. As the game’s only programmer, he’s responsible for developing the anti-cheat software for the game, and implementing it when ready.

Among Us content that isn’t developed in response to malicious hackers ruining the game for millions of players has a more natural progression, beginning with Marcus’s work as a designer and artist. Marcus recently stated in an interview that when it comes to developing new maps for the game they hand draw the entire map.

While they likely test layouts and task placement before finalizing the map, the process of producing an entire image to set the game inside will naturally involve much more of the team than just its programmer.

I found an old drawing of some of the first task concepts in Among Us. You can probably recognize all of them. pic.twitter.com/V3p1WYox2z

— Puff (@PuffballsUnited) October 23, 2020

How can Innersloth improve development on Among Us?

For most of us who likely hadn’t heard of Innersloth until only a few months ago it can be hard to remember that Innersloth aren’t just the creators of Among Us. All three of the developers got their start on Newgrounds, and joining up to work on a game together was a mutual decision.

As a result, their company structure isn’t going to be like that of a studio deeply ingrained in the industry’s culture. Innersloth doesn’t have a producer they need to answer to, the only people they are beholden to is themselves.

Additionally, while they might now have the ability to hire another programmer or developer to work on the game, they would need to figure out how they would handle new hires, or even if they want to.

For a company used to working as a tight-knit group where each person has a sizable say over various parts of the game it can be difficult to know exactly where a new person would fit into their development cycle. Nevertheless, Among Us could definitely benefit from some extra hands on deck as they work on implementing new features and content into the game.