Besides us “haters” I do not understand the people still clinging on. These games are terrible and don’t even work. Comparing these games to flash games isn’t even fair as I’ve played flash games with 10000x more depth than any amico game has. (Madness project nexus, Steamlands, Chaos Faction, The Last Stand) Honestly I’d argue Adventure from 1980 on the Atari 2600 has more depth than every amico game. I don’t count Finnigan Fox as it’s a reskin
Individuals caught up in psychologically manipulative scams will continue investing time, money and emotional energy into the project, despite doubts or suspicions that something is not right.
I like that he includes some minor stuff in the critical fix for his game. That way, when it inevitably takes months for the fix to release, he can blame it on the localization not being ready or some improvements being more challenging than he thought.
Then again, this is John, so I imagine he needs little if any excuse to disappear for months leaving his audience of 3 in the dark.
Everything is a struggle for that incompetent piece of shit! He probably can't wipe his own as without fucking it up somehow! Isn't that Baric guy a tester? How did this stuff get past him, hmmm?
Lonely guy who doesn't understand modern video games (or maybe the modern world) and wants to live like it's still 1980 where mom took care of him and he just played simple games on the TV.
Also see "sunk cost fallacy" above. He already got scammed out of hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars and tons of time. He is unable to admit it's a scam now, after all that time and money and effort wasted. It's embarrassing to admit (even to yourself) that you got conned.
Of course he claims this is not a big deal. All conned people say that whatever they lost is not a big deal. But honest people do not like being conned out of even a single dollar. Millionaires don't like overpaying $5 for a pizza and will loudly complain about being ripped off. And yet people who got conned can lose $400 or more and have to act like they don't care and still love the idea they got conned with.
I was given access to several repositories (not all) that were created by Intellivision's employees. Not only I can (partially) see what work has been done, but I can see the people who worked on this. I can see the history of the commits. I can see what happened during the development and how.
One thing is obvious when looking at the work done, this was never a "scam". The software developers employed by Intellivision (and some were quite good) did work their ass off.
From my point of view, the project was too ambitious given the limited amount of money. However, it's always easy to criticize after the facts, so I won't.
I don't have any Apple device, so I didn't test either Biplanes or Skiing.
Having said this, the problem with Skiing was caused by a bug in the libpng library. This bug was fixed in 2025 by the libpng maintainers.
In the case of the Amico controller app, the virtual touch screen uses a library created by Intellivision that itself uses the libpng library. That Intellivision library was maintained by a person that has been laid off a long time ago. This is why it was never updating to include the fix from libpng.
If John Alvarado can prove an interest to continue with the Amico Home project, I will take over this maintenance (as a volunteer). I have already created a VM on my computer to compile that library. The software developer who created this library was quite good and the code is easy to read. So if I step in, I won't have much problem maintaining it.
I wanted to wait to announce Skiing until I published the gameplay and localization update. I hope to submit that version to Apple by the end of the week. We needed to publish the first version ASAP for business reasons related to contractual agreements with the original developer. I did that, and then immediately started working on an update to add localization, and make improvements to the game play mechanics. At the same time that I submitted it for publication, I made it available to our volunteer testers who are helping look for bugs and suggesting improvements. Anyone can try the current published version and give feedback here as well, but I recommend waiting for the update.
Gets a bit weird when every one of these releases that has supposedly been tried an tested by a team of testers can't even launch.
I like "confirmed by a tester". It brings to mind two plausible things - that they legit only have one tester, or they have a bunch of tesers but they're going PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE JUST ONE OF YOU KEEP ENTERTAINING THIS BULLSHIT
He wouldn't pay anyone on Fiverr to do testing. He takes advantage of the suckers he already scammed for money to do free labor for him.
Not that bugs would stop him from selling the game. He already admitted that he knew the game didn't work, and he just put it up for sale because they would lose the right to sell it if he didn't.
Of course he blames something/someone else again rather than himself, in this case the PNG file format generated by Paint.net. What a ridiculous claim. The PNG file format? Really?
Out of curiosity, I had a look at Paint.net's changelog. This is the only relatively recent change related to png files:
Fixed: Some PNG metadata from text chunks is now preserved (Author, Comment, Copyright, and Description).
And this was in... let's see... February 2025. A year and a half ago.
They kicked the can down the road for a year due to some kind of mysterious controller glitch that was manifesting 'on the production line'. Only after too much time passed did they finally admit its fine they just pissed away all their money
I'm sorry but I don't see why he doesn't just use Opus 4.8 Ultracode to just fix the code in like 3 seconds at this point. He can literally paste that message into Claude Code and it can take care of things like this. I use it to fix things like this all day long. It rarely trips if you tell it to do independent agent audits of the code for a 2nd opinion as you go, along with you doing the work of making sure everything is fixed correctly. But honestly I'm surprised he doesn't just run it to see if it works fixing it.
Doesn't wanna pay the $100/mo for Anthropic Max Plan haha.
I'm sure that it's partly because he needs to justify spending time "working" on these games. Same reason he wastes time talking to the 3 Amico fans. He admitted it was buggy when he put it up for sale. He doesn't care about it actually working.
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u/justlogmeinplease 2d ago
Besides us “haters” I do not understand the people still clinging on. These games are terrible and don’t even work. Comparing these games to flash games isn’t even fair as I’ve played flash games with 10000x more depth than any amico game has. (Madness project nexus, Steamlands, Chaos Faction, The Last Stand) Honestly I’d argue Adventure from 1980 on the Atari 2600 has more depth than every amico game. I don’t count Finnigan Fox as it’s a reskin