 The long-awaited airship map has finally come to among us, giving players a whole new massive level in which to accuse each other of being imposters. Officially announced during the game awards in December 2020, the airship map was a long time coming, and from the sounds of it, building this new addition to the game was an exhausting and challenging prospect for the small team at InnerSloth. In a developer blog post on itch.io, InnerSloth's community manager, Victoria, outlined some of the biggest hurdles that the team had to overcome while making the airship. Apparently, the delay was caused in large part due to business meetings. There were meetings over the future of the company. There were legal meetings dealing with unlicensed merchandise. There were meetings about new employees for the small team. Any time they needed to have a meeting, it meant taking the developers away from actually developing. Victoria explained, it was easier when we were just a group of three and there weren't really many demands of us. But now things have changed, and we need to follow a more rigid process since so many other people are involved. Include the fact these things often require meetings that take hours, multiple times during a week, and that for a while our one programmer was also doing all the non-game business stuff meant a lot. And yes, part of the problem was all the incredibly sus knockoff merchandise. Some might say, imposter merchandise, that the team felt they needed to shut down. This meant speaking to lawyers, and this also ate into their time. Said Victoria, You may also have noticed how much fake among us merch has been out there. We had to get legal help for that, but the way IP laws work is that the only ones with the power to talk to lawyers and have things taken down are InnerSloth officially. That definitely groups into the sheer amount of meetings we have, and the considerations we need to make. We want to encourage fan art and totally welcome it, but we don't want corporations taking advantage or ripping up anyone. At this time, the team was also working to approve official genuine among us merchandise, such as the colourful crewmate plushies that have recently gone on sale. This was yet another distraction from actually building their promised update to the game. So why not simply expand the team? Well, that made sense to a point. InnerSloth didn't want to grow too big and dilute their shared creative vision, but they recognised that having more than a single programmer was a good idea. Buuuut, in order to hire more staff, they needed to spend time going through applications and interviews. Plus, there were other human resource issues to organise, such as holiday pay and health insurance. All of these decisions were necessary, but whenever they were working on this, they weren't working on the airship. They also had other issues to deal with. A more popular game meant more taxing server demands, the constant threat of malicious hacks, and having to deal with online harassment and toxic players who were behaving inappropriately online. The solution to this last point was to implement accounts into the game so that rule breakers could be banned, but this was no small feat of programming. All of this would be relatively easy to slap into a PC update, but because among us is also now on Nintendo Switch and Xbox, any change to the game needs to go through an approval process with both Nintendo and Microsoft before it can be released. Plus, says Victoria, honestly, we're also a bit tired. Since among us blew up so late in 2020, it meant we weren't able to take a proper winter holiday, and sometimes we can end up working quite late handling things. This isn't something to be proud of at all, especially since the games industry often has a problem with crunch that we want to avoid, but we're trying to be transparent with you and we want to be better about this. The good news is that Inner Sloth not only finally got the airship level completed, they also added their required extra staff, and discovered the joys of outsourcing issues that the core development team really didn't need to deal with. Said Victoria, it helped the servers stabilise when we moved to Multiplay. Play everywhere made getting Switch out in three months possible. Jewel wheeled handles all the merch. Robot Teddy for business development. Legal and accounting and HR are all new partnerships that produce the burden of running Inner Sloth. So the moral of this story is, you don't have to do everything yourself. Just as Inner Sloth found it difficult to oversee a global media empire without outside help, you too should recognise when it's better to rely on other people. Through collaboration we can all make the most of our individual skills.