I played around a little more with attempting to diversify my color palette so everything isn't brown... Everything is still really brown. I know my shadows should have a blue hue in origin. It looks good when I practice but I can't quite get the colors to blend right when I actually try to apply it to my pixel environments.

I want to work more on this later but today I mostly focused on creating 2 other tiles to help flush out the rest of the prototype environment. A dirt tile and a dirt-path tile.

With some simple environment tiles we can start building the world for the prototype. However a basic tile set has 8 sides for one texture or material. The other 7 tiles are used to transition into other tiles that have different textures or materials. The dirt tile probably wont tile well if it's rotated on it's side...however the rock tile is totally fine. Ideally I want to get as much use from each tile as possible while also creating the illusion that every 32x32 tile is unique. The path tile will need some transition tiles to be used after being flipped but I can work all that out later. It's more of a battle of attrition than an obstacle.

Here is what the prototype might look like as everything get's filled in.

After I make the basic materials I will go through and make the rest of the tile sets. For example, the bottoms, sides, and tops of the rock cliff.