Top left is ascii vanilla. Very cluttered looking in comparison to the others. I thought with your old-school black background idea, it would be nice to get floors mostly black. Or you go all in and give them intricate engravings, because you have the skill as an artist and the pixels, at least in the 48x version, to actually do that.
Heh. I could try some different floor patterns, now that I think about it. Like you said, the important bit is pushing floor tiles into the background, either by making them darker or smaller. I also looked into it and it'll be possible to create different overrides for rough, smooth and engraved floors. Engraved floors will be a little tricky, though, because they could be almost any tile.
Unfortunately, though, I won't be able to create detailed 48px tiles. For GemSet, I'm drawing everything in a native 24px resolution and upsizing it using this
neat little program. (XBr 2x algorithm, BTW)
Oh, and the tree stumps you see in that mockup are pretty much the final designs. I've created nicer-looking 3D stumps, but unfortunately I can't make them look natural for both the 2x2 trunks and 3x3 trunks. We'll have to stick with the uglier flat stumps instead. :/
Thanks! Everything looks much better now so I think I'll be doing a quick v1.21 update to fix these minor issues.
EDIT:
OK, it's up. *Insert Back to the Future quote here*