Advice on making a small scale game look AAA quality?

Tad

Hi, so i'm just one guy, a freelance artist, and I want to do a small game demo size game.
most likely a 3rd person shooter.  
I have some success making pretty environments.  
But given that it's just ME, and I have a life to live, the chances of me getting a working game done and keeping that quality are slim.

So I have two choices. Either water down the content with stylish visuals (toonish lower poly)

or see if you guys have any clever tricks to keep the quality up.

I'm willing to sacrifice things like scale,  camera angles, gameplay control, all sorts of stuff to "cheat" and be able to stuff more detail into a smaller game.

For example, older devilmaycry titles would lock the camera down so you could only see a fixed perspective. Made it easy to stuff pretty into that frame.

The only idea I came up with personally was just having smaller level sizes. But that sounds kinda dumb for a 3rd person shooter.

Anyone care to pitch in?

Eric Chadwick

You asking for solutions? Or for partners? If the latter, there's an Unpaid Work section, and it's best to post some sample art to get people interested.

lotet

Minimize your workload is pretty much the only thing you can do.

make smart design choises that reduces the amount of production assets. both in art direction, game mechanics and game design.

poopipe

Isn't the biggest difference between a AAA title and everything else the size of the outsourcing budget? 

Simple answer... 

Prototype properly, fix your game design in stone and then work in iterative sweeps across the whole project.