No, that's perfect, thank you. I'm interested in learning, not having my ego treated gently haha.
That's good to hear man. Many people like to have their egos stroked but don't realize that the more mistakes they make and fix, the faster they become better at whatever it is they're trying to learn. Getting a bit harshly critiqued is good medicine for conditioning yourself to remember something the next time you start to do it wrong. We can thank Pavlov and his dog for that one.
I'm of the mind that something is only 'wrong' when it doesn't come across to others the way we'd intended it to.
Fortunately, regarding intentions though, it's fairly easy to tell when someone seems to be making the same mistakes you made (or might have made if you didn't learn how to avoid them first). The fact that I don't see many of these mistakes in your work says a lot about how far you've come.
I like the gritty look, but the main issue is readability.
The viewer needs to be able to easily and subconsciously discern walls, ground and roof from one another. Right now it really blends together, especially due to the shading.
Try squinting as a test to see if it passes for readable or not.
The squint test is an excellent suggestion for stuff like this btw. If things blend together too easily and aren't separated by hue/intensity/contrast, it's a good idea to add in something that breaks them up (bushes/grass/puddles/streams/etc.)
Since your inspiration is apparently Chrono Trigger or Final Fantasy styled tiles and perspective, keep in mind that stuff like the dark blue of the brick-wall and, what I'm assuming is a blue brick floor (bottom-right square just below and outside the main tile assembly, the second largest tile assembly), can appear to be very different things with shades as dark and as hue-shifted as the shadow portion of the wall. What I mean is the part that looks like a 'floor' also looks like a rooftop with shingles. This is due to the subtle shift in hue you have on the wall just before it meets with the joint that meets the 'floor' area.
That joint essentially looks like a roof joint area, with shingles, sort of like in Japan. Without the context of a building's front, etc., this looks like it could be either a roof *or* a walkable surface. Like I said however, the culprit is the shadowing on the 'wall' above the joint separating the wall and joint with a hue-shift, and the fact that the 'floor/shingles' are the color of the joint and appear to be much higher up due to the darkness of the wall's shadowing, and the wall's hue shift to warm seems to intentionally separate the two.
I doubt this is the intent, but that's why I'm sharing it with you.
