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Among Us devs reveal this highly requested feature isn't coming soon

Hand-drawn maps rule out a big change.

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Among Us has become the hottest indie game in recent memory. The social-deduction title assigns players one of two roles at the start of each round. "Crewmates" need to complete a list of tasks aboard a spaceship they're trying to escape, while the "Imposters" need to kill the crew without raising suspicion.

Among Us has amassed a fanbase numbering in the millions and has consistently remained one of the most-watch games on streaming platform Twitch since the tail end of summer 2020. This newfound fame has drawn a lot of attention to its three-person development team, InnerSloth.

The trio of devs appeared on Twitch's Weekly Gaming Show on October 1 where they discussed future plans for the murder-mystery title. InnerSloth took the interview to let their fans know that one of the most requested Among Us features, a custom map creator, isn't happening anytime soon. But they've got a good reason for it.

'Among Us' devs explain why a custom map editor isn't coming any time soon.

TwitchGaming

Gamers have been begging for a custom map maker for months now.

Among Us only has three stages at the moment and while InnerSloth is currently working on the fourth, players want the ability to implement their own level designs like in Super Mario Maker or Overwatch. Unfortunately, that would require InnerSloth to remake every existing level in Among Us.

The team revealed that they've thought of the idea before, but they'd need to give players map assets so they can easily edit their own Among Us stages. Those assets simply don't exist in the current version of the game.

"The maps currently are completely hand-drawn," said InnerSloth's Marcus Bromander. "There's no tile sets or anything, so we'd have to redo how we make our maps basically."

Polus is the third and most-recent map added to 'Among Us.'

InnerSloth

All of the Among Us maps are continuous images that haven't been itemized by the developers. So if you wanted to add a box from Storage or a Cafeteria table from The Skeld, InnerSloth would need to crop these items out from the map and create an asset that players could call on in a map editor.

That would take a considerable amount of effort especially if InnerSloth wants to give the type of customizability players want. They'd essentially need to break down each map into tiles and items that can then be repurposed elsewhere. This is a task that isn't a priority for the team at this moment.

"We would need to provide the assets so we would have to draw walls, boxes, and accessories," said developer Amy Liu. "[We would need] basically a [tool like in the Sims], to being able to build your own map. That does take a lot of work."

Shipping a map creator would require InnerSloth to remake all of the maps in the game currently.

InnerSloth

As it stands, InnerSloth is focused on ridding the game of a sudden influx of hackers and cheaters as well as four main gameplay updates it laid out in a September 28 blog post. These include server stability improvements, an in-game friend system, a fourth map, and colorblind support for certain tasks and crewmember colors.

The devs have tested a few of these changes in a recent beta update that has rolled out to PC players on October 10. InnerSloth is hard at work improving Among Us, but a full-fledge map editor is something that won't ship until the team has ironed out the core gameplay experience first.

Among Us is available for PC, iOS, and Android.

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