Among Us Devs Talk About Burnout

The developers of Among Us talked about burnout in an interview - the game's rapid development has taken its toll on them.

IN A NUTSHELL:

Three developers of Among Us talked about the burnout they experienced while working on the game;
The studio was in crisis in late 2020 and early 2021.

A few days ago the developers at InnerSloth told about working on Among Us after the game's incredible success. In an interview with Anthony Padilla, they said that the sudden interest spike put a lot of pressure on them, and working intensely on its development required a huge investment of time and energy. Each developer talks about the burnout a little differently.

Any way you look at it, Among Us really did have an interesting story - although the game was released on Android on June 15, 2018, it didn't gain fame and recognition until 2020, when it was hyped up by streamers. The unexpected success quickly began to take its toll on all the game's developers... and there were only three of them: Amy Liu, Marcus Bromander and Forest Willard.

“The pressure to get things done quickly was really high. September to December, we’re talking to Xbox, PlayStation. They were gonna try to get Among Us on these platforms, which usually takes many months—like, half a year to a year. We were like, ‘Three months! We’re gonna try that.’”

The words of Amy Liu, the artist working on the title, are particularly thought-provoking when she talks about the effects of racing against time: being cut off from family and friends, or spending Christmas alone. Marcus Bromander, the game's artist and designer, mentioned the technical issues as well as their reception in the community:

“The amount of attention that we had on us, and like, every little thing we do is gonna get looked at and criticized. We changed the font at one point because it needed to be changed, and people were like ‘Bring back the old font! I don’t like this new font.’”

The developer even said that in early 2021, he no longer had the strength or desire to continue working on Among Us. It was just too much. His words go hand in hand with how programmer Forest Willard describes the situation:

"When you’re under hundreds of millions of [peoples’ worth] of pressure, they don’t understand that it takes months. The server issues should be fixed tomorrow, adding new stuff should be next week—it’s so easy [to them]. It’s a lot of pressure. It’s overwhelming.”