So I watched a group of Twitch streamers play Among Us last night, and I was able to watch 5 of their streams in parallel, and I noticed two weaknesses in this game design:
- A stream-friendly mode needs to exist where
1) Does not display information that people watching can use to cheat
2) Does not display the join code/or optionally only shows it for the host
3) The clues that someone is an impostor are not constantly revealed
A) Don't highlight the names of the impostors, this should be something that only the impostor can see when standing near them, and the game netcode doesn't transmit to players that aren't impostors.
B) When players die, only directly caused deaths should reveal the impostor to the victim. Include other kinds of indirect deaths like sabotage/traps which just show the victim dying.
C) Make the UI for the impostor and the players the same.
- A larger map and a larger player count needs to exist, as the small map with 10 players is a little too easy.
- The tasks are also too easy, a way to "solve" this is to require that players be "assigned" to a command post (eg engineering, medical, security) and only assign those tasks to those players lists, and should the impostor kill all the players of one command post, those tasks only appear for players entering that room, so they have to actually do more thorough searching. This also solves the problem of "character died in a room and was not discovered"
- Include ways of sabotage that can kill a single player trying to fix it, independent of "kills everyone" sabotage.
edit: Now that I think about it. Include "hide the body" for the impostor, which means they have to kill the player, pick them up, and then go to a vent and hide the body, or throw the body out the airlock/lava/etc when no players are in that room.