In this case study, John Blau, a Game Designer, shares insights into what his team at Schell Games learned from designing features to increase prosocial interactions in Among Us 3D.
On the Among Us 3D team, we observed that players consistently had the most fun when playing with established friends. Since social interactions are core to Among Us 3D, we wanted to know how to encourage strangers playing the game together to behave more like friends.
I was considering this behavior when a colleague of mine shared Kind Games: Designing for Prosocial Multiplayer from Polaris. The paper uses examples and language surrounding prosocial game design, and I wondered what a similar game loop looked like for Among Us 3D. My thought: One of the reasons betrayal is funnier with friends is because you have a high degree of trust in them. There’s more room to fall from grace. In the game, though, trust isn’t a one-way street where users gain each other’s trust and then break it irreparably. Players play several rounds, each time deciding whether to trust one another or not. In my view, trust for Among Us 3D looks more like a positive feedback loop:
In this loop, breaking trust is performative, acceptable, and expected. When that’s true, players build more trust in each other between games by laughing about their betrayal. Players return between rounds to retell and reinterpret their deception.
The game’s features should support both parts of the loop — Making Trust and Breaking Trust — in safe and repeatable ways. As the lead designer on the project, I placed a bounty on new content, features, and roles designed with this pattern in mind. Shortly after, we had dozens of feature pitches that addressed the Make / Break Trust Loop. Designing for this loop brought forward the dev team’s creativity and improved player reception.
This article presents features and roles we designed with the Make / Break Trust Loop in mind, including the stories of how they were built and qualitative player data on how the features were received.
Role: Vigilante
The challenge
Roles are some of the most requested content in Among Us 3D. Content creators continue to play Among Us modded with hundreds of roles and sub-roles, from Engineers to Shape Shifters. The dev team needed a way to prioritize some roles over others. The Make / Break Trust Loop helped the dev team make these decisions.
Design solutions
Early on, one designer pitched the idea of “a Crewmate role who can kill anyone once per game.” I liked this role’s simplicity, but at face value the role is a dream for bad faith actors who want to grief their own team. The designers working on this role’s pitch had to describe how it would Make and Break Trust. This produced important lines of design thought:
1. To lessen the potential for griefing, the role’s name and aesthetics were considered. Players often lean into roleplay in Among Us 3D by pretending to “fix the vents” as Engineers or giving villainous monologues before killing someone as the Impostor. We considered names like “Sheriff,” “Vigilante,” “Lone Ranger,” and “Detective.”
Through playtesting, the designers determined that the Vigilante was the framing that was most resonant and produced the most Make Trust behavior. To many people it felt heroic, like a superhero or antihero. Calling the role Vigilante emphasized the heroic potential of a Vigilante’s actions rather than the consequences of noncompliance. We commonly observed players playing out themes of justice:
- “I kill players who were bullying other ones, and [turn around] while getting chased to kill the Impostor.”
- “If a crewmate was verbally harassing or annoying another and didn’t get voted out… Let’s just say they faced justice for their crimes.”
- “The Impostor just killed my best friend, I have to avenge him!”
2. The designer pitching the role highlighted its ability to transition from Making Trust to Breaking Trust over the course of a single match. There were many possible moments that this role created:
- “I will protect you!” → “I’m killing you because you’re suspicious.”
- “I know you’re the Impostor!” → “I’ve made a horrible mistake by killing someone innocent.”
- “I’m on your team.” → “I’m playing to protect myself because I am the hero.”
Reception
Data showed that this was a role the community could embrace in unique ways. Here are some Vigilante strategies from our players. Notice how they describe a range of roleplay from democratic judges to skulking antiheroes:
- “One round, a crewmate walked up to me and said they were the Impostor and were going to kill me. Don’t remember if they were faking or not, but I simply turned to them, said ‘I’ve got a better idea…’ killed them, and immediately returned to my tasks.”
- “I like to ask around who everyone thinks the Impostor is and then kill that person to see if they’re right.”
- “Lurk in the shadows, waiting for the perfect moment to strike and deliver justice (=.”
There was one piece of player feedback that I would like to print out and frame that perfectly captures the Make / Break Trust Loop:
“For three rounds in a row, I kept getting killed by the same Crewmate, Vigilante or Impostor. In between rounds… I mentioned that when I was Impostor, I would kill him first thing. Only [when the next round started] both of us were the Impostors.”
Game mode: Tag
The challenge
The Among Us 3D dev team wanted to create a second core game mode that targeted players seeking a break from social deduction. This was inspired by modes like Hide N Seek in Among Us. Even though social deduction wasn’t the focus of this mode, social interactions still needed to be.
Design solutions
We considered many different game modes and designed Tag from the ground-up to emphasize the Make / Break Trust Loop. Tag is an infection “one becomes the many” game loop similar to what exists in Halo. There are two teams in Tag: Crewmates and Infected. If the Crewmates can complete 10 tasks before everyone is infected, Crewmates win.
When thinking about this mode, some questions came up. Are we creating a strict infection (zombies) mode, or should we create something more asymmetric, like Dead by Daylight? How competitive should the mode feel? Leaning back on the prosocial Make / Break Trust Loop produced alignment and answers for the design team. Designers focused on:
Push team identities
Players wanted to feel pride in their shared identity as Crewmates. The more camaraderie players had at the start of a round, the funnier it was when teammates (now Infected) chased them later. To achieve this, we gave Crewmates abilities that encouraged them to work as a team and designed a new character model for the Infected that set them apart from other players. Whereas the Infected move slower, play simpler, and are singular in purpose, Crewmates are resourceful, individually impressive, and stronger together.
Deception + Clever plays > Movement tech
Personal displays of movement techniques (strafing, dashes, etc.) are cool to perform and watch, but they don’t inherently create trust between users. Rather than prioritizing movement skill, we focused on verbs and abilities that enabled social drama — “fakeout,” “bluff,” and “distractions.” These mechanics created moments where players could perform trust (“stick with me”) and then subvert it (“I’m out”), reinforcing the Make / Break Trust Loop.
To Make Trust, we added abilities that encouraged players to work together as Crewmates and group up:
- Guard saves other players by providing a shield from infection.
- Zap temporarily prevents an enemy from infecting crewmates.
- Scan provides information on enemy locations which can be shared to guide other players around the map.
Other abilities provided playful, dramatic opportunities for users to Break Trust with each other. Both of the following abilities often result in users saying, “I thought we were gonna stick together, but at the first sight of danger, you ran!”:
- Vanish allows users to turn invisible for a short time.
- Vent lets players hop into the vent systems around the Skeld.
Reception
Data from the live, released game showed that players leaned into their identities as Crewmates or Infected. Notice how players said:
- “[My favorite part of this mode was] watching in absolute horror as my entire crew gets brutally mauled by a horde of Infected, and I have nothing that I can do to save them.”
- “There were many times that crewmates were doing tasks in a room together, but when a zombie would walk in it erupts into chaos and people started running and venting and when someone eventually gets caught, you can hear someone screaming ‘NOOOO!’”
- “[My goal was to] infect everyone. When trigger was on cooldown, I’d just run around messing with the crewmates until it came back off cooldown.”
Lobby activities: Camera and Summoning Circle
The challenge
Game Modes and Roles offered opportunities to engage in the Make / Break Trust Loop, but social interaction in Among Us 3D begins before the game even starts — in the lobby. Users hang out here waiting for a game to start. The dev team decided to focus on other ways to specifically Make Trust between users in the lobby.
Design solutions
Among Us 3D has a large population of kids playing. When put into online spaces together, kids naturally want to push the boundaries of what’s acceptable in the digital space and gauge the responses they receive. Rather than trying to punish players for testing these bounds and being disruptive, we redirected their energy toward prosocial activities in the space by encouraging them to engage in Make Trust activities with other players as soon as possible.
Camera
The first activity we designed for this purpose was a Camera. The Camera requires two people to operate: one to stand in front of the Camera, and another to press the shutter button. The Camera requires coordination to get the right shot and produces a shared artifact (the photo) for the players’ efforts.
Summoning Circle
We also designed a Summoning Circle, which requires six players to stand around a table to complete a ritual. We wanted users to look forward to other players joining their match and have a reason to be patient while waiting for more players. The Summoning Circle is also an activity that prompts immediate inclusion: “Hey, come join us! We need one more person.”
Reception
These features were released at the same time in order for us to gauge player reception. The Make / Break Trust Loop was explicitly called out by players in our feedback, who wrote:
- “The lobby [activities] give me a great way to pass time while waiting for the host to start or to create interesting stories with other players.”
- “I like these, especially the camera. I think more props like this would be great to have… that way people aren’t chanting ‘start it’ while I wait for a bigger lobby 0_0.”
- In response to the question, “What moment do you remember the most?”
- “Everyone holding a memorial for me using my picture that I took.”
- “Playing with friends in prep phase.”
Final thoughts
The Make / Break Trust Loop is important to Among Us 3D because making and breaking trust is a core part of our game. Players call out by name opportunities to Make Trust between each other in the lobby and viscerally remember Breaking Trust later during a match. It is our explicit design intent to have players engage in this loop, and I believe it makes Among Us 3D stronger.
Now what?
If you are designing game features for prosocial behavior, ask yourself: “What moments in my experience will become more fun if users have more trust in one another?” For us on Among Us 3D, those moments are when users Break Trust. For your game, though, it may be a moment such as:
- Trust between users is tested or judged.
- Opposing teams are asked to take a break together, or teams are reshuffled.
- Users are incentivized to share or reciprocate limited resources.
Identifying those moments is the first step toward building a prosocial loop that hooks your players.
The following resources might also be useful:
- Kind Games: Designing for Prosocial Multiplayer has a wealth of examples of prosocial design in games if you are looking for ways to Make Trust.
- “How do I know if users are Making Trust in my experience?” — The GAMERS Framework can help you identify metrics that measure player behavior.
- “Do my players think Breaking Trust is safe and expected?” — Read about Building Psychological Safety for Players.
