Hello, Crewmates!Once again, it’s time to go BEHIND THE BEANS! We hope you’ve enjoyed the last blogs we did for our newest roles: the Detective and Viper.
As a treat Dave has turned back the clock to take us through the process for some of our other roles – the Tracker and Noisemaker!
Take it away, Dave!


After releasing The Fungle in 2023, the next goal was to release a batch of new roles. Players had been asking for new roles for a while, so it was exciting to start prototyping different ones. Roles are a great way to create new mechanics, make the gameplay feel fresh, and add new twists to the social deduction component in Among Us.
This exploration resulted in 3 new roles being released in 2024: Tracker, Noisemaker, and Phantom. I felt that the Tracker and the Noisemaker were interesting because despite both being Crewmate roles, they’re design opposites. This allowed them to have stronger, unique identities while also serving two different playstyles.
Noisemaker
The Noisemaker has a very straightforward ability: when they’re killed by the Impostor, they send out an alert to the other Crewmates, guiding them to their location. It’s a pretty simple role to play because it’s passive. It automatically triggers on death. It’s a great role for players who don’t want to have another thing to do during a match. Some people just want to focus on tasks and fixing sabotages — and that’s totally okay. Honestly, that’s me a lot of the time.

Of course, there was concern about the Noisemaker being too simple. This was feedback the team got frequently: it could be a letdown to get assigned a role and not have an extra ability you can use at the press of a button. But, simplicity is the name of the Noisemaker’s game. It’s not to say there isn’t any nuance to the role. A clever Noisemaker can lure the suspected Impostor to kill them in a spot that gives them away. I’ve been tricked like this a few times myself while I’ve been Impostor.
The simplicity of the role doesn’t mean it’s a weak role either. It’s actually quite powerful in that the alert is a game-wide effect. It can be the deciding factor that throws off an Impostor and gets the Crewmates the win! Releasing a low complexity role was the design intent behind the Noisemaker, so I decided to keep them straightforward and simple.

After it was released, seeing the Noisemaker so positively received really warmed my heart. From casual players to streamers, everyone understood the role and valued how game-changing the Noisemaker’s ability can be. One my favorite comments to this day is still:

Tracker
Like I mentioned earlier, the Tracker is the mechanical opposite of the Noisemaker. The Tracker has the ability to place a tracking device on another Crewmate. By opening their map, they can then see where the other Crewmate is while they move around. They were designed for the super Crewmates who, on top of doing their tasks and fixing sabotages, are constantly figuring out who’s safe and who’s suspicious.

Of course, this ability is powerful. For new players, the ability was designed to be straightforward to use and understand. But as players start to get better with the role, it gives gameplay depth and surprise.
On a surface level, the ability allows the Tracker to confirm another Crewmate’s location. The ability becomes more valuable once you start combining it with other information people share in Emergency Meetings. Very clever Trackers even use the ability to catch a venting Impostor, a disguised Shapeshifter, or an invisible Phantom!

It was really great to see the Tracker being highly praised and valued as well. There was a lot of depth added to the design of the Tracker and players were quick to find it and appreciate it.
Learnings
From these two roles, I was able to confirm a couple of important ideas:
- Players appreciate roles with low skill floors. The Noisemaker’s skill floor is very low and it was well received. Therefore, it wouldn’t be farfetched to release other roles around this skill level.
- Players also appreciate roles with high skill floors. I was concerned that the Tracker was overdesigned or overcomplicated, so it was nice to see that players were able to fully grasp the role and all its nuances.
The release of roles in 2024 was so amazing. The outpour of excitement from the players was really motivating for the team, who worked so hard on it for so many months. We’re using this positivity to continue creating more and more great stuff. This means I’ll probably be back for some more blogs, so keep a lookout for the next Behind the Beans!
Off to make more noise,
Dave

Gather round, ghouls and gals (yes, even you, Brown). The crew at Schell Games and Innersloth are thrilled to announce our latest, most spooktacular limited-time event for Among Us 3D: Afterlife!
Starting today, October 2, 2025, things are about to get weird and wonderfully wicked aboard The Skeld II. We’ve been dying to show you what we’ve cooked up in our cauldron.
Afterlife Adds the Wraith and the Guardian Angel
The veil between the living and the dead is thinning, and it’s unleashed two brand-new roles that are sure to lift your spirits… or drag them down into the abyss!

Guardian Angel
Just because you’ve been ejected doesn’t mean your task list is finished! Stick around as a legally distinct friendly ghost and use your ethereal powers to protect the remaining living Crewmates from a terrible fate. You can shield a living Crewmate from one Impostor or Wraith’s attack, granting them an extra lease on life.

Wraith
Some Impostors just can’t be stopped. The Wraith works with the Impostor and can continue their ghastly work from beyond the grave. Being voted out is no longer the end… it’s just the beginning of a new nightmare! While living,
Wraiths start with a countdown to when they can become a Wraith, leaving a body behind. In death, the Wraith gets the kill ability just like the Impostor, leading to a powerful apparition who can kill at will without worrying about being caught. The only clue a Crewmate has that one is near is an eerie audio cue that means RUN.
Creepy Cosmetics
But wait, there’s more! What’s a Halloween party without costumes? We’re creeping it real with a dreadful new collection of cosmetic items available for purchase as individual items, bundles or weekly drops. Find the perfect fit for your fiendishly fashionable tastes.
- New hats including the classic knife-through-the-head gag and everyone’s favorite Halloween hockey goalie
- Full body bundles like the gross-out slime and wrenching Frankenbean that will get you first place in The Skeld’s costume contest
- New skins like the Wear Wolf (yes, you can finally give your Bean chest hair) and winged BatBean, which just might already have the perfect hat to go with it.

Aethereal Aesthetics
The Skeld II itself has undergone a monstrous makeover! We’ve carved out some time to decorate, and the ship is now crawling with plenty of things that go bump in the night. Keep an eye out for:
- A mystical Summoning Table where Crewmates can try to contact the great beyond by all lighting their candles at the same time (no promises on who or what answers back!)
- A spooky Photo Booth to capture memories with your fiends… ahem, friends.
- Jack-o’-lanterns fill the Cafeteria along with eerie coffins, suspicious slime and more to make the Bone Bash spirit complete
- Limited field-of-view for the living to make every game just a little more terrifying

Muting the Monsters
We’re kicking off Phase One of our Moderation refinement with this update as well. Naughty ghouls who break the Code of Conduct will now receive Mutes as a warning for poor behavior.
- Account Mutes — Temporarily lose the ability to use voice chat features in-game.
- New Warning Message — A message will appear to alert players who receive temporary account mutes, including additional context and the duration.
We are currently working on implementing additional Moderation-based adjustments. Please stay tuned for more information.

So, assemble your spookiest squad and prepare for some paranormal pandemonium. The Afterlife event materializes in Among Us 3D on October 2, 2025.
Come on in, the haunting is fine!
Stay suspicious!

Crewmates!
It’s time to prepare for departure… on the Battle Bus!
We heard your screams for the Among Us Back Bling to come back to Fortnite. (We really heard them. Some of you were relentless. Wow. I feel like I am lacking such passion in my life.) So, starting now until October 4, 2025, you can once again purchase the Back Bling and Distraction Dance Emote in the Fortnite Item Shop.

Here’s what will be available:
- Crewmate Back Bling. This comes with ten Styles based on Crewmate colors from Among Us: Red, Blue, Green, Pink, Orange, Black, White, Yellow, Brown, and Purple. Assemble your squad and create a crew!
- Distraction Dance Emote. From our game The Henry Stickmin Collection, dance your way out of any situation!
Enjoy, have fun, and stay suspicious.
Victoria
Howdy, Impostors!
It’s time for another session of Behind the Beans with our principal game designer, Dave. If you missed the last deep dive, you can read it here! This time, he’s here to talk about our newest Impostor role: the Viper. This venomous role has increased the levels of chaos and added lots of spitting (ewww) to lobbies.
Remember to say it, not spray it.
Dors


Viper
The Viper is a simple role to understand. This was important to keep in mind when designing and iterating on the role. But don’t be fooled – there’s actually a lot of depth! Where and how you choose to kill now requires more thought. “How can I give the body more time to dissolve?” and “What are the entry and exit points of the location?” are just two questions to consider. The more discrete the location, the higher the chances of the body fully dissolving without a trace.
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A good Viper also uses their sabotages to the fullest. Need to give a dissolving body more time to disappear? Lock it behind a Door Sabotage. Need everyone to move as far away from that kill you did in Navigation? Trigger the Reactor Meltdown. A clever Viper that uses their full toolset can get away with multiple kills without ever raising a hint of suspicion.
Prototyping Phase
During the initial prototyping phase, it was just the design and programming teams working on it. To create a placeholder dissolved body, I took the existing art asset and erased it using dynamic jittering to get the intended look.

The Viper had an instant impact in our games! If a dissolved body was found, the discussions were a lot more engaging around the state of the body and who was around it. On the other hand, games were very scary when Crewmates were dropping like flies but bodies were never being found.
The Viper checked off a lot of boxes for a good role:
- It promoted more discussion in meetings
- It allowed the Impostor to strategize their kills in new ways
- There is push and pull between the Viper and Crewmates
Thus, the Viper was good to move on to the next stage of development!
The Post Prototype Process
The next steps were to work with the art team to figure out the theming of the role. Since the dissolving body was so core to the Viper, figuring out the theme revolved around that. Here are some of the concepts from our brainstorming session that the art team explored:




Beyond this, there were a ton of other interesting and wide-reaching ideas, but ultimately none of them stuck as much as the dissolving acid. The Viper is a great theme and the dissolving acid is a fun visual to work with.
Testing a Color Matching Option
One final idea we explored with the dissolving body is the color scheming. By having the acid match the color of the victim, it was a gruesome visual of a melting Crewmate.

As fun as this was, we ultimately went back to having just one acid color. The Viper having a specific color for their acid made for a stronger identity with the role, and it gave us time to do more fun things like creating the Viper’s kill animation!
Finale
The Viper was a great role to work on. Since it was so fun right off the bat, it gave us more time to explore the art. I hope you enjoyed this sneak peek on some of the exploration we did with the acid! Seeing all the cursed ideas from the artists was hilarious, so I figured you’d all like to see this too.
And behold, the final Acid:

Another Q&A
Before you run back to spit on other Crewmates, take a look at the Q&A video we did to answer questions about the Viper, featuring Daniil!
Avoiding Acid like always,
Dave

Hello, Crewmates!
Welcome to a special blog post I’m calling “Behind the Beans.” We wanted to give you a peek behind the scenes (or beans in this case), and talk about some of the design decisions that make Among Us what it is currently!
Thankfully, we have our amazing principal game designer, Dave, to walk us through how the team took on some new challenges in developing our newest roles: the Detective and Viper!
I hope you have your magnifying glasses polished and a fresh notebook: today, Dave will showcase what it took to bring the Detective role from a cool concept into a bean-ality.
Take it away, Dave!
Dors


Detective
When I think about a detective, I picture someone who gathers clues, puts evidence together, and solves crimes. This is exactly what the Detective Crewmate does! With the Notes and Interrogate abilities, they can write down important info, gather clues from other Crewmates, and put it all together to solve murders.
The Detective is one of the most complex roles the team has ever worked on. A big part of its complexity comes from the Notes ability. It’s a core component for the Detective that holds a lot of important information and can be the deciding factor on whether the Crewmates win or lose.
Considering all of this, it should be no surprise that the Notes ability underwent many, many iterations. So for this blog post, I want to take you through a few of the iterations and highlight why changes were made and some of the difficulties we encountered – one issue was so scary we almost delayed the role entirely!
The Early Days
The early version of a role is always very barebones: grey blocking, reusing assets, and doing the absolute minimum to get the point of the role across. For the role prototypes, the goal is to “find the fun” as fast as possible. This means hacking together the required parts of a role so that we can playtest it ASAP.

One of the first versions of the Detective had a Suspect List which was created if you found the body and used the Inspect ability on it. Of course, if someone else were to walk in at this moment, they will see you standing over the body and can only assume one thing…

With the Suspect List, the Detective automatically got a list of other players, one of which is guaranteed to be the killer. Through playtesting, we found out pretty quickly that there were a couple of pain points with this version:
- First, the role completely relied on finding a dead body. It’s pretty common to go a whole game never finding a dead body. If a player was a Detective and never found one, they never got to use their ability. This was a huge bummer!
- The second issue was that the Suspect List was too powerful because the killer was guaranteed to be in it. Through discussion, the list would be quickly narrowed down and the Impostor outed. We tried a variation where the number of suspects in the list was dependent on the number of players left in the match but that got way too complicated way too quickly.
With these two major issues, it was important to make some changes and try a new version of the role.
More Player Agency
For the next iteration of the Detective, I wanted to give the player more agency through information collecting. True to the fantasy of being a Detective, they should be able to gather clues around the map.
To alleviate the dependence on a Detective finding a body, we created “crime scenes” that replaced a dead body after the next Emergency Meeting. So, if Lime is the Detective, but Pink found the body, Pink will say that it was in Electrical and Lime can go there after the meeting to see the crime scene. The Detective will be able to Inspect the crime scene to get the Suspect List for that murder.

Speaking of the Suspect List – that also got a big change this iteration. Instead of giving the Detective a list of actual Crewmates, they have to build their own list based on information brought up in meetings. The Detective could build their own Suspect List by investigating other Crewmates around the map to learn their location at the time of the murder.

Playtests for this version went a lot better! The Detective’s ability was actually being used and crimes were being solved. Matches were more evenly balanced now that Impostors weren’t guaranteed to be on a Suspect List. But with this iteration, a new (and big) issue emerged. The Inspect ability got overloaded with how much it could do. It made it difficult to teach and play the role. Running around to inspect crime scenes and inspect other Crewmates was far too much for one role.
This wasn’t an issue that could be easily solved with a minor adjustment. A big change was needed that still maintained the fantasy of playing a detective but in a way that didn’t overcomplicate the role. On to the next iteration!
Almost There
The first step towards simplifying the role was in the crime scenes. Instead of having to go to each one, the Suspect List had a section to manually add where it happened. This change is what made the Suspect List turn into the more generalized Notes ability. Along with simplifying the role a lot, I was happy with this change because it fulfilled a lot of other ideas:
- It encouraged more discussion in meetings because now the Detective is very dependent on the person who reported the body to state where they found it
- It maintained the fantasy of being a Detective by filling in the info they learn into their notes
- It allowed counter play by an Impostor. If the Impostor self-reported and lied about the location, the Detective has a much harder time trying to solve that murder

Because “Inspect” wasn’t for dead bodies or crime scenes anymore, it was renamed to “Interrogate” to better fit the detective fantasy of interrogating other Crewmates and learn their whereabouts.
This version of the Detective playtested really well, and is ultimately what we ended up releasing. However, in classic game dev fashion, there was one more big issue that came up that almost caused us to put the role on hold completely. Internally, we started to refer to this issue as The Hallway Problem.
The Hallway Problem
The Hallway Problem exists because maps are made up of lots of hallways. Maybe not so much Polus and The Fungle, but this was even worse because they both have huge outside areas. Basically, the Hallway Problem is the issue that the Detective’s abilities are greatly nerfed if the Impostor kills outside of a room. Because the Notes and Interrogate abilities revolved around room names, kills outside of rooms made it nearly impossible for the Detective to solve those murders.
Using The Skeld as an example: if a dead body was found in a hallway and a Crewmate who was interrogated was in “Hallway” at the time of a kill, that could mean the Crewmate was next to the body or it could mean that they were on the other side of the ship! This doesn’t help the Detective at all.
The team explored tons of different solutions, some involving pathfinding, some raycasts. Each solution had their strengths and weaknesses, but ultimately we were all in agreement about setting up “Near Zones”. This simply meant manually defining areas on each map as “Near” a room. Therefore, a Detective wouldn’t get “Hallway” in their Notes anymore but instead “Near Reactor” or “Near Storage”. This at least gave the Detective a clue they could still work with.
What started as a scary problem ended up being solved by a pretty simple and straightforward solution. I’m really proud of how the team put their heads together to tackle this issue.
Final Touches
With “The Hallway Problem” solved, the team was able to confidently move forward with getting the role ready for release. Along the way we were able to further polish the role by doing things like adding an Impostor type selection to the Notes and making the Notes icon change based on the active case.
With two abilities, the Detective easily has one of the highest skill floors and skill ceilings out of all the roles we’ve created. Building a case takes a long time, and if you’re able to finally put one together, it’s then about convincing your allies that you can be trusted. Don’t forget, this puts a big target on your back as Impostors look to take you out before you solve a case – it’s truly a high stakes, high rewards type of role!
It was a real journey iterating on the Detective to get to where it’s at now. I’d be remiss if I didn’t shout out Jade (woooo, thanks Jade!) who took on the bulk of the programming iterations on the Detective. As a team, we had a blast playing the role and I hope you have just as much fun as we did!
Q&A
Before we conclude this deep dive, take a look at our Q&A with Daniil from TikTok, and get answers to other burning questions about the Detective!
Off to cook up some more roles,
Dave
