In the whole time I made tilesets, the most problematic one always has been the grass tiles. Most examples simply don't look good, and better looking games often even avoid them entirely. A textured approach is often too noisy, rendering single strands or bush-like structure tends to look bland, barely better than just flat color. Anybody having a insight on this? Maybe a different approach?
There are some examples of good grass I know, but they are kind of limited on their own.
Jetrel had some very interresting grass for his unfinished RPG project but it depends on a lot of tiles and careful hand-placement of them.
Frogatto seems to walk arround this issue by not having larger areas of grass, only small detailed patches on a very rocky surface:
My own approach is still using flat colors with just a few clusters suggesting grass structure here and there:
If anybody else knows some worthwhile examples of grass tiles please post them in this thread.