[WIP] Need guidance with cave/mine tileset

[startselect]

I fixed up the left/right/bottom walls with just some waviness for now.
Regarding the nr of tiles, I couldn't really figure out the concave look I was aiming for without doing specific diagonals that transitioned to horizontals or horizontals that transitioned to diagonals, maybe they can be merged in the future if I figure it out but for now they're staying.
Now to the texture. I'm not going to lean into the meat wall but tried my hand at more geometric rocks, and this is the result so far. Best viewed at the rightmost alcove where I have a 3 tiles wide wall.

I'm quite pleased with how it turned out visually at least, the pillary-ness of the rocks wasn't what I was thinking about when I started, it just sort of happened. And it doesn't look as concave as the meat wall to me. Nor does it really look "dug-out" but maybe it won't matter in the greater scheme of things.
If anyone has any tips that would be great but otherwise I'll update again once I've done the rest of the wall.
Thanks for all the help so far!

[yrizoud]

This is not related to the walls, but I was thinking the grounds would benefit from having large "random" patches of a darker/lighter color, rather than a uniform color/texture. This would continue the work of "breaking the grid", and give you more choices for room design : Even an actual rectangular room will look less geometric if patterns in the ground break the symmetry.
This is exactly the kind of color difference that I imagined, although in this case it specifically hints at a muddy ground.

[Vinik]

@startselect great move towards rock texture! I think the "right" way to make this kind of prismatic wall look concave in the middle would be to have the "tops" of the chunks be progressively shorter as you go up, considering that you are transitioning from a more horizontal slope (tops with larger areas, more horizontally flat surfaces) to a more vertical wall(less tops, more vertically aligned"faces"). You would still be getting from lighter to darker, not only because of the palette swap but also because you would be adjusting the balance between the amount or density of brighter clusters per area. I don't know if I was able to explain what I meant in a clear way

@yrizoud dude, I know that tileset of yours by heart lol, I found it somewhere else (another version?) and, by chance, I have being studying it for a while, and comparing it with the way it was done in older games when low contrast between colors wasn't available. I am not wishing to hijack startselects thread, as he is focused on walls, but that is a topic that could definitely use a proper tutorial / its own discussion thread, mainly on how to texture floors legibly while keeping colors close enough that it remains flat, and how to balance plain color surfaces with sparse implied textures like cracks, spaces between planks etc.

[startselect]

@yrizoud yes the floor will definitely get an overhaul once I get somewhere good with the walls. I'm really impressed with how they can be the same colors as the walls without bleeding into each other which I always run into when I try that. I will def try that!

@Vinik I tried tilting the upper stone tops more and more and it seems to work, didn't get very far today though but I will continue on monday and update then! And go ahead and hijack all you wan't, I'm very interested in floors as well!

[startselect]

This is as far as I've gotten yet. Tried flipping some diagonal wall tiles and I feel like it works ok, the lighting doesn't come from the left on them but it feels kind of like a ambient lighting is hitting the parts that stick out and the directional lighting wasn't a goal in and of it self anyway, just a side effect to get the geometrical shape of the rocks to show.
I think the bottom parts of the walls feel curved in a concave fashion but the tops don't feel like they're curving back out. Not really sure how to fix that.

[Vinik]

First of all, I like it, it is not a bad cave at all

That said, this is one of the traps of sticking to a predefined palette (I stumble on it a lot): while it makes everything cohesive, you have to make do with colors you have already chosen (and mostly with value distances you have already set) in new contexts where maybe you would need less contrast. The lower slope is shinning a bit too much for the general light level of the room, and if you were not working with a predefined palette, perhaps it would be best to tone down the two brightest colors. Maybe just switching down the colors within the same choices will work, but then I think you would need to darken the rest of the wall to keep the distinction, and I am not sure that would help. The light seems to be aligned with the camera and more to the top, which looks good actually.

Right now it is pretty much a full sloped wall, like a zelda cave, but with a less sloped bevel near the ground, which is quite nice as far as classic rpgs go. I think the reason why it is not concave has less to do with how you textured it, and more to the fact that it lacks the top bevel. It was easier to depict in the bio wall, but is harder in the more geometric-earth one because, at that perspective, the planes on the top bevel would very very squashed, look at how narrow they are on my textured template above. I don't have a suggestion for a solution from the top of my head, but i think you could very well stick to the current shape and only work on polishing it, mostly by making your tiles consistent, connected and reusable. Sometimes what we idealize on pure geometry doesn't reads that well or is just not worth it on execution, and if a simpler form works, it works

[startselect]

Thank you @Vinik!
Nothing preset about my palette, I'm absolutely going to change it, mostly to fix the brightness issue on the lowest parts.
I've done a texture pass on all the tiles now and I'm going to leave it for a bit to get some fresher eyes when I come back to it to find all the smaller issues.
Next up is fixing the floors. I will try to use colors from the walls as in @yrizoud's example. But I should probably try fixing the colors first.
In the game I'm hoping to have some palette swapped versions of this.

[eishiya]

I think even more variety in the rocks would help, especially on the diagonal-wall tiles.
The actual shapes of them though, those look great! Way more rocky than the original ones.

[startselect]

Changes:
- some rock sizes in the diagonal tiles
- fixed some tiling issues.
- lowered the brightness and saturation of the brightest color.
- added a new floor with colors from the walls.

I started on another floor too to have 2 floors transitioning in some pattern across the floor but I'm still doing all the transition tiles. I'm going to try having that floor be just a single color, we'll see how that goes. I feel it often looks good when other people do single color floors and always terrible when I do it

[eishiya]

This is much better! If you can, I'd recommend varying the rocks even more. Especially towards the top, they're all consistently small there.
I like the colour change, makes the rocks look less shiny.

The floor feels rather noisy. As with the rocks, more variation in the size of the "segments" would help. You may also want to make all the segments larger in general, since right now the scale on them doesn't match the scale of the rocks. The high contrast might also hurt legibility of things on the floor, so fainter colours for the texture might work better in a game.

Single-colour floors work well when the walls fit that style. I think the way you've done the walls calls for something a little more involved than a solid colour with occasional details like you had before. Perhaps some faint texture with spots of solid colour? Solid colour frequently broken up by textured tiles?