https://i.imgur.com/4yh7Bqt.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/oMbtAL3.jpg
Q: Were these screenshots taken when you were working at EA/Maxis?
A: Yes, these have placeholder "programmer art" that looks really shitty on purpose, so nobody mistakes them for final artwork!
Q: I thought as much; also noticed the 'Live' 'Buy' and 'Build' mode placeholder text on the UI ;)
It's harder to make ugly stuff in 3dsmax, so we had to make it inexplicable instead. Things tended to get weird when we were doing things like testing the 3D sprite exporter animations. I am at a loss to explain this, other than it's an experiment in post-transmogrification texture mapping...
https://i.imgur.com/gmLNaBu.jpg
You could place "spores" on the ground that would grow into big Mona Lisa Mushrooms!
Before that, I also used the same "programmer art" approach for some demos I made at Kaleida, when I didn't have an art department at my disposal to do my bidding, but knew just enough Photoshop and Director to be a danger to myself and others. (Some of it literally looked like shit and smelled like stinky cheese that made people scream!)
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/1995-apple-world-wide-develop...
>To make any sense of this, you should realize that it’s live improvisational performance programming art. The graphical and audio artwork are just ugly placeholder “programmer art”. The references to “great content” are laughably ironic!
>I didn’t have an art department at my disposal, and I have terrible graphics design skills, but I didn’t let that stop me, because that wasn’t the point!
>The art is in how it works and what it does and how I use it, not how it looks or sounds.
>It was meant to inspire ScriptX developers as well as myself, and it led to me to later develop iLoci and MediaGraph.