Made the game's 3D world smaller. Less areas but with more polish, quality > quantity
This is my own 3D engine, which I'm currently porting my upcoming game to. It's called "Brutus Force" / brutusforce and it doesn't even use matrix math. It's just trigonometry (you can - obviously - create 3D graphics with only easy-to-understand trigonometry, but no one talks about it!)
That's also why real quality survives all trends, because it can't be replaced by anything new, because nothing else can be like it.
Compared to This Is (NOT!) A Car Club, I want to improve quality instead of quantity. Have an interesting variation in the graphics instead of just _many things_. So I'm designing shaders to be able to use multiple images for house textures and character/object sprites without slowing down the GPU.
Technical things like this are advanced but very solvable. Making good tools is mostly about de-learning all the bad tools with too many options and buttons that put technology in the way when you try to focus on your art.
Actually getting good at art and graphics is the real work, there are no cool tricks for this except experience and time...
I try to focus on health instead of results. Mostly because it's a better thing to care about, but... *speaks in a lower tone* also because it allows me to reach better results (Don't tell anyone!)
I know of this contradiction, and I make use of it, but at the same time I don't allow myself to believe in it, because then it would stop working...