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Stuff that the community has been doing:

- Mass Among Us, 100 players, 1 imposter. Basically it's hide-and-seek, where the imposter slowly kills off players while looking like them.

- Proximity chat, eg audio (or text messages) can only be seen/heard when nearby outside the meeting.

- Hide and seek (1 imposter, last non-imposter wins)

- Captain role. This is just a house rule that some voice-chat's do where RNG picks one player to be the captain (and can also be the imposter) and they get a one-time order, so they could either use it to save themselves or have everyone vote off one specific player.

I'm wondering how poorly Accounts are going to be implemented. Like every-single-game needs a 2FA system to prevent spam and greifing, but it's also a huge impediment to improptu play.  So I hope regardless of accounts, peer-to-peer player or private server (eg designating one steam/apple/google account linked to the game) actually hosts it and uses the underlying service to find the host.

Would automatic visme lipsync (like ovrlipsync) to an audio source be a possibility? It looks like you were working on something this two years ago.

Indeed, but sometimes the RNG results in the same person getting the impostor every time. So this is more of a way to say "don't give me a straw" when the game draws straws for impostor. The other players don't see who's opted out.

Just make them QTE on console.  The problem with the tasks isn't how you do them, it's that you do them at all.

eg the asteroids game, analog pad, one fire button. The leaves, analog and fire. The wires, press fire on the left side, then the right side. Swipe card, press fire to hold the card and then flip the analog pad.

I've literately watched people play this game and get Impostor every time, while simultaneously having people complaining about it. 

It requires less development effort to just relay the packets to a second client's IP address and have the second client turn the UI off.

These are suggestions mostly in the name of solving RNG issues.

To solve the "so and so is always impostor/so and so is never impostor" problem where someone can play all day and always or never be the impostor (eg the rng appears broken.) This requires minor changes.

First, when the players are in the "lobby", allow players to select "crew and impostor OK" toggles, this is only to allow people explicitly opt-out of being the impostor for the next game. It has to be set every round.

Second, allow playing the game with zero impostors as well. Basically, this mode is "players versus the ship", which happens when all players opt out of being the impostor. In this mode players can only lose by not completing all the tasks and having one of the typical sabotage items ending the game. The Sabotage items will be triggered roughly every 10% tasks completed or if any player hasn't done a task within 60 seconds.

Third, it would be preferable to randomly select impostors 0 to 3 when the impostors are not verified when people are voted off. This should also not reveal the other impostors to each other, which means they can also kill each other (unless "friendly fire" is turned off.

Different game engines have different requirements. Among Us is Unity, Fortnite is Unreal. Fortnite is also a first-party game from Epic, which means they can directly optimize it for mobile devices. Unity is a third party game engine, and thus the developer may rely on the engine or third party libraries they have no control over. 

Though as I said, if the game spontaneously closes, that's usually the OS closing it due to running out of memory, which means it could be leaking memory or something else on the device leaking memory which makes the OS close programs that are running.

True, but the goal is remove the unintended cheating from shoulder-surf (or stream snipe) by watching everyone streaming the same game. As soon as someone dies, it does come back to "did you see who?" and the victim would already know who it was if they were watching carefully.

Especially from spectators to the stream. For the streamer, they can hide their twitch/youtube chat while they play so they're not tempted, but they can't keep people from watching multiple streams to sus out who the impostors are just by looking at the names on top of the characters or the voting screen. I was watching one set of twitch streams the other day, and it's like within a minute people in the other chat windows are already going "it's (other streamer)". So the idea here is to make sniping the stream unreliable. 

Another way to accomplish the same thing, albeit requires a lot of effort on the part of the developer, would be to generate a "camera" and "microphone" output from the game and the streamer can then map their microphone through the game through discord or OBS or however way they want to stream it, and just send an alternate image/audio during the parts that would spoil the game. Like a greyscale mosaic over dead bodies. Creating a second copy of the game to run that just relays the info without the spoiler data is easier for streamers to understand IMO.

While I think the audio unintended cheating/self-spoiling is a problem, at least when you play with people you know, on twitch, that can be rectified by having someone controlling the mute buttons that's watching the stream but not participating.

I had epiphany on how the broadcasting a stream without cheating can be done, and it's a bit more simple and obvious. Have the streamers run a second copy of the game that is in "spy mode" that hides the UI elements. So in "spy mode" it just clones the gamestate but removes the UI buttons and task list. This can also then be used with mobile users so they can play the game on a mobile device but someone else can stream them.

Yeah, if that kills the game, you might need to avoid that room, as that room basically quadruples the memory requirements when it loads. I would probably suggest playing the PC version or switching to a more capable mobile phone.

That would require hiring more staff to do non-programming work.

I mean really, there is a self-moderation aspect here, and that's to utilize an external service (eg members to my patreon/discord/twitch followers/subscribers,etc) and as long as you're signed into that service through the game, anyone you play with that is part of that discord server, will get access to those additional skins the discord server has already approved. Much in the same way discord and twitch have their own emoji stuff.

It's probably not super-trivial to do, but it would encourage those playing the same game on the same discord to use their custom skins. 

This would result in everyone making lewd skins.

They would need to implement voice channels and they can't currently scale the gameplay right now. Given most games that even have voice chat, have everyone just use Discord anyway because you need the matchmaking OUTSIDE the game in the firstplace.

Some kind of plugin for Discord/Teams/Slack would probably be the easiest solution.

Your mobile device doesn't have enough RAM, as that's what mobile devices do when they run out. Try closing everything but the game first.

Watch people stream the game and you would see where I'm coming from. People can snipe a stream if the join code is on the screen, or leaked in chat, and basic streaming setups don't crop or cover areas of the screen.

I think the solution to the voice chat requires more effort than the devices the game runs on presently permit. Like a PC or Mac version can route and split audio, thus a PC/Mac version can "route" the audio from Discord and mute discord appropriately, or create a virtual microphone inside the game, so the user can pipe the audio through the game and have the game mute the microphone channel to discord while leaving recording/streaming audio up. 

Though I could see maybe a plugin to Discord that could mute the mic.

The colors/numbers bit is a different issue and falls into the "this isn't colorblind safe" problem. It would need to be fixed by using colorblind-safe palettes, and if someone is in colorblind mode, it removes those colors from being options.

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.