Prototyping First, Assets Later
If you read around some game developer behind the scenes you might see how some of the biggest AAA games first began as a bunch of simple 3D objects. Take for instance the early stages of Sea of Thieves.
As powerful as graphics can be to enhance the game experience, what’s most important at the core is good game-feel, without which everything else might be built on shaky foundations. More often than not you can nail the game-feel with just a bunch of capsules and cubes. This helps ensure you don’t get bogged down in the superfluous details (at this stage) of the aesthetics, and it also results in a prototype you can quickly show to other people, because no amount of words in a description or even gif/short video can truly beat the experience of several seconds with a game.
Therefore at the beginning of any game project it pays to lay the early groundwork of capturing a desired game-feel at the prototype stage, before effort is invested in making things look pretty.
