Here goes some library tiles

[Chonky Pixel]

I love the floor detail, much more sensitive to your style than my edit!

I am usually a fan of dithering, but I don't think it fits here. Partly because your style is very clean and smooth. Partly because of the way it interacts with floor details.

[eishiya]

Seconding Chonky. Texture looks nice, dithering doesn't.

Most games with texture patches have whole texture tiles and separate texture-edge tiles for extra flexibility, but you seem to be trying to do it with only one set of tiles. If you go that route, consider having your detail floor tiles not have all the dark lines go all the way to the edge of the tile. It'll make the details more organic-looking by having them not line up as much, and by introducing gaps in the texture.

[Chonky Pixel]

I thought I'd try some more very quick edits. The top-right bookcases have angled shadows.

I wanted to see if they read more like shadows to my eyes and they seem to. They can also be used to make the top bookcase look more like it's touching the wall. It seemed to me not to touch the wall before the edit.

You'd probably want to do some thinking about light sourcing and how the shadows would work if you wanted to go this route, it was just a proof of concept. It is opening up a bit of a can of worms though.



(There's a lot wrong with this edit, like the shadows on the right-hand wall, the shadow on the back wall being too narrow, some of the floor detail, etc. It's not meant to be a final product, more a test.)

[Vinik]

Thanks for the edit chonky, I am seriously reconsidering straight down shadows. The reason I committed to front light from the beginning was pretty much to save time, since I'll be making a lot of assets in the same style, and front light allows for mirroring tiles. I have been given this same warning before, and perhaps I have underestimated how much angled lights impact in selling tridimensional volume. I'll have to munch on this for a while, it would change a lot of things.

[eishiya]

Depending on how this is implemented, you may be able to save time and space by having the shadows be their own solid-coloured tile layer that sits between the floor and the objects. If you choose its colour and opacity wisely, it could look as nice as bespoke shadow tiles, but with the ability to use the shadow tiles on any surface. Since it doesn't look like the floor texture affects the shadows anyway, there doesn't seem to be much need to have dedicated shadow/shadow-transition tiles for every floor type, and you can probably get away with some simple blocky shadows for most objects.

[Xenon02]

I think no, dithering doesn't look good, for me I guess.

[Vinik]

Depending on how this is implemented, you may be able to save time and space by having the shadows be their own solid-coloured tile layer that sits between the floor and the objects. If you choose its colour and opacity wisely, it could look as nice as bespoke shadow tiles, but with the ability to use the shadow tiles on any surface. Since it doesn't look like the floor texture affects the shadows anyway, there doesn't seem to be much need to have dedicated shadow/shadow-transition tiles for every floor type, and you can probably get away with some simple blocky shadows for most objects.

Now that's a good idea. In fact, since I have some sort of palette LUT to enforce showing colors from the palette for some effects, I really could try to make all shadows be on layer with alpha. If I have some fixed levels of black+ alpha matching the average value distance between the color steps, it "should" render with a fitting shadow color from the palette. Probably without much hueshifting, unless I can hack it by putting some red or blue in the black to make the LUT choose a shadow from a more distant hue lol. Great idea

[eishiya]

With an enforced palette, getting hue-shifting isn't hard, it's easier to get good results that way than with just raw assets :D! If your source art has the same palette as the output palette, it's very easy for the code to know when it's dealing with blended colours and react appropriately. Two ways to go about it:
A. The option you mentioned: Colour the shadow layer so it isn't black (this could be done in-engine or as part of the source art, depending on how much flexibility you need) and let a basic colour-matcher do the rest.
B. Use a hand-crafted LUT that knows to hue-shift darker versions of certain colours towards certain other colours. This could even be combined with (A) to have different kinds of hue-shifting (this is what I do in my projects).

[Guy Akiba]

Dithered shadows, yes or no?

Both look good, but personally, I prefer the solid shadows.  Also depends on what you're going for and what your sprites look like, but yeah.  I deff like the solid ones