Emergency Meeting #32: Server Issues & Upcoming Roles

Hi Crewmates! 

Happy October and spooky season! I bet you’re wondering when the next update is.

WEEEELLLLLL.

We’re working on it? :D But no really, I know it’s been awhile since our last one with concrete information, so here’s a transparent-a-dev-log as possible to explain what’s been going on.

Server Issues

From Sept 20 as of today, you may have noticed our servers were a bit wonky, and you weren’t able to connect or create a game at many points during that time. This was due to a DDoS attack we were experiencing. Essentially, someone was spending a lot of money to send A LOT of traffic to our servers, which overwhelmed the datacenters. When a datacenter is overwhelmed the server maintainers close off the network for our servers and we have to take an outage. There are no privacy concerns or anything associated with this – the only problem is the fact people aren’t able to play the game when this happens.

When it comes to DDoS attacks, our options are limited, and honestly as much of a headache for us as it is for you. To counter it, we did get new hardware, shuffled some things around, and generally improved things, but these things take time to test and get approved, hence the delay in implementation. (And meanwhile, the DDoS continues for as long as the other person has money to throw at it, which is an expensive endeavour. Usually attackers just give up after an hour or two, but at peak, this was at a scale that took down Google servers some years ago!) 

Everything should be up and running extremely soon, with future preventative measures! We weren’t sure if we should share this with you, but we wanted to be completely honest about the realities of game development, especially live games. 

Roles and More?

But we’ve been pretty quiet about what we were exactly working on, haven’t we? Well – one thing I CAN tell you is our next *gameplay* update will be focused on implementing new roles. Which ones? That’s a secret. How many? Uh, also a secret. (More than 2.) (Maybe 3.) (Could be 4.) We also have another update planned around the same time, but I can’t say anything about that one yet.

The roles we’ve come up with may be slightly different that the ones you’ve seen around due to mods, because these are ones we’ve always wanted to implement into Among Us even before we released the game back in 2018. We just never had time for it. But thanks to the continued success of the game (thank you for playing!), it’s possible now. So we hope you enjoy what we come up with.

Crucially, because we want to make sure everyone can enjoy it, it’ll be an update coming to all our current platforms. And it’ll be free of course! As I’ve mentioned before, you mostly only see community mods available on PC due to the fact porting those things to other places like mobile and console are much more difficult (and in some cases impossible without being a developer.) We can’t wait for you to see what we’re doing with it! It’ll definitely add SO many layers and depth to the original game, and during our playtests we’ve already had a ton of fun testing it out. 

Consoles

We’re still on track for console release this year, albeit later than we originally intended. Because this next update is more than just a simple patch and will introduce (hopefully) two big changes to the game, making sure they’re up to snuff and compatible across ALL platforms – PC, mobile, console – means there are way more blockers coming for us.

Our ideal release date was in September, but we ended up moving it because we didn’t want anyone who picked up the game on Xbox or PlayStation to have a suboptimal experience and roadblocks were thrown our way. (See why I haven’t told you all a date yet? Gotta be 100% sure before we’re comfortable sharing that information!) Thanks for the patience on this!

Fan Fun

We get a ton of amazing fan creations, and I want to be better at highlighting that! I’ll try to include some cool ones I’ve seen around the internet, but for now, here a some from Twitter that I loved.

And that’s it for this update! I figured we can start calling our dev logs emergency meetings, so I roughly counted how many dev logs we had before and ended up with #32, hence the title of this once. No idea if it’s accurate but this is what we’re rolling with now! See you around the internets.

Cheers,
Victoria

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

All illustrations by our artist @thisishannako!