Behind the Beans: Detective

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.

Exhibit A, the Notes for the Detective

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.