Among Us News

Hey everyone!

Sorry for the month delay, but this update is a pretty big one!

Translations
We have mentioned in several places that translation is something we want to do, but it's huge project. To move in the right direction, we've added better international text support to the chat rooms. You should now be able to type and read most accented characters, Cyrillic , and Korean. If you find there's a character that doesn't show well or is missing, let us know!

We are also opening up an application for translating into our most popular languages: Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian. If you want to volunteer, please join our Discord and DM Aemu if you're interested!

Filtering
We know it can be hard to find a game in your language or with your preferred settings, so we have added some filters to help out. These again focus on our most popular languages.



Maps
Hey wait, there's a map filter in that previous screen! Yep! This is our way of letting you know that we're starting on a second map for Among Us. We're just starting it, so there's not much to say now, but we will keep you updated as we make progress!

• We've added a 5 minute ban to players who leave games or close the app in the middle of a game.
  
• Impostors can now use the medbay scanner.
  
  • Common tasks are intended to give impostors a single place to expect all players to pass through. The shared animation unfortunately gave crewmates a strong means to ensure certain players are not the impostor. While there are aggressive impostor strategies to combat this, knowing 100% who is or is not an impostor is not a mechanic we think is in the spirit of the game.
    
• Fixed/improved various bugs:
  
  • Sabotages would sometimes start after a meeting starts
    
  • Scan animation would sometimes play while the player can move around.
    
  • FindGame list sometimes has a ship in the background.
    
  • Rounding causes game options text to be inconsistent
    
  • Can accidentally report bodies through the map screen.
    

That should be pretty much it. We're pretty excited about the direction we're taking with Among Us, and excited to share what we have in store, but that'll have to wait for another time. :D

Until then, feel free to join our Discord or give us a Tweet if you have any bugs or sweet Among Us stories to share.

(Written from the perspective of the sole programmer ForteBass) It has been a crazy week! On 12/14, YouTuber Kevin Choi posted a new video. He's made a few before and we really like them even though we don't understand Korean... Usually this causes a small spike of players which dies down and everything is fine. But this time:



Now that spike is there mostly to get your attention. It was caused by a bug in the server interpreting some packets as connections after users had failed to connect. Truthfully, I believe there were about 680 people connecting on December 14th-15th. However when we crossed solidly above 200 players, Amazon AWS "Burstable Standard Mode" kicked in and as we drained our CPU credits dry, our CPU was "gradually capped" to 10% and lag spikes started disconnecting players every couple minutes.

At the time, I didn't know AWS "Unlimited mode" existed and the CPU behaviour looked like lock contention to me, so I worked 12 hours each day from 12/14 through 12/18 trying to remove locks and optimize the server code to smooth CPU usage. Meanwhile Aemu and PuffballUnited (Among Us artists) were holding down our exploding Discord as hundreds joined to report issues. I learned about Amazon's complicated burstable pricing after a brief stint with a Windows Server (worked pretty well, tbh, but 1GB ram is not enough for Windows Server). Finally, switching over to unlimited mode fixed most things (but it's super expensive!) and the next few days were just removing a few deadlocks and race conditions caused by my sleep-deprived, reckless programming.

So Here We Are
From the graph above, you can see that we're reaching 1200 concurrent players sometimes now. And that is capped by Among Us Server so we don't go above 80% CPU. The server is actively turning players away at peak hours.

Or it was... Part of the problem with not expect such popularity is that I hardcoded our Amazon server IP into the game, so we can't leave Amazon despite them charging an arm and a leg. (And denying some of our Russian traffic.) But this new version of Among Us will let us change our hosts so we can more easily (and cheaply) scale up support for Among Us.


Most of the changes were in the server, but there were definitely some bugs caused by the app itself. And we wanted to keep things in the holiday spirit (especially after you guys dealt with terrible connections for days) so we added a little gift.



It's just a New Years hat, but we just wanted to thank everyone who stuck with us through our growing pains. It will be automatically granted when players open the game from now through January 4th. Since it isn't purchased separately, it will be lost if you uninstall Among Us.

The Fixes
Fixed Oxygen sabotage task not completing at 2/2 sometimes.
Fixed players appearing to not move or being invisible.
This seems like a small bug, but can manifest itself in big ways. This bug could only happen when joining games, but if everyone else leaves, the bugged player will become host. Players with a bugged host might experience sabotages, kills, reporting, voting and other things not working.
General improvements to connection stability from the app side.
That's it for now. Hopefully these are enough to get us through the holidays. It might be possible to slip a small update between Christmas and New Years, but if not, we'll definitely keep you all updated in the new year.

Again, thanks for playing Among Us and if you hit bugs, let us know on Twitter or Discord. And if you are just enjoying the game, feel free to let us know about that too. Happy holidays! :)

Hey all!

Sorry this was posted elsewhere, I forgot to add it here. I'm still getting used to the Steam community stuffs.

Happy holidays from us at Innersloth! The end of the year is a pretty slow time for updates because of holidays, and we've been working hard on The Henry Stickmin Collection and a new unannounced game. But we still wanted to be sure and put something nice into Among Us as well, so along with fixes, we also added a holiday hat bundle.



Limited Edition Holiday 2018 Hats
Open Among Us on a PC version (Itch.io, Steam, or Kartridge) during December to permanently gain 8 holiday-themed hats. They might be lost if you uninstall or change computers, but we'll look into Steam Cloud Saves. iOS and Android players pay just 3 dollars for all 8 hats. If you uninstall on mobile, you can recover the hats in the store menu. (Open the menu in Android or click Recover Purchases on iOS.)

Emergency button disabled for first 10 seconds of game
There's really no reason for players to call an emergency at the start of the game, but it happens so often that we disabled it. There are good reasons for immediately calling two emergencies in a row, so that is left unchanged.

• Among Us now disconnects when app is suspended.
  
  • This one mostly affects mobile, but this is the leading cause of joining a game and only seeing stars, so this should be a very nice fix!
    
• Issues when starting sabotage at the same time as a meeting is called.
  
• Players can no longer cause multiple sabotages at the same time.
  
• Announcement shows up when not new.
  
• Softlock when players call emergency at the same time they are killed
  
• Hats were backwards or incorrect in some kill animations.
  
• Remove black borders from intro on wide screens
  
• Add a couple missing SFX.
  

We're really happy to still have so many players in Among Us despite slowing down on updates a bit. Since I'm new to the Steam community features, feel free to drop into our Discord or Twitter to report a bug or say hi! It'll probably get a response faster...

Hey all!

Today we're announcing our release pricing for Among Us! Starting 11/16 (when we launch here on Steam), Among Us will be $5 for PC versions (Steam, itch.io and Kartridge). Mobile versions will remain free-to-play with ads.

Any money we make goes towards keeping the Among Us server alive and Innersloth producing future games.

We'll continue to update Steam with patch notes and updates from now on, but feel free to peruse our previous blogs here:
https://innersloth.itch.io/among-us/devlog