What's on the floor?

Time to start refining those dungeon rooms! What I like to begin with when doing so is the very foundation of a room: the walls and floors. I like to start with this so much, that as a matter of fact, I finished the suggestion below way back when we hadn't even finished the winter area yet:

Very early version of the walls + floor!

As it turns out though, applying textures you create in a small mockup window to an actual room doesn't always end up the way you expect it to. The textures looked horrendous together when they were repeated over and over! Way too much stuff going on, making my eyes hurt big time.

Ugh! My eyes! My eyesssss..!

And not only that: the colors also proved to be an issue. Since this is the autumn version of the room, naturally the props will have a lot of yellow, orange and red colors. However, since the walls and floors are already in very similar, vibrant colors, the props will pretty much blend in and most likely only serve to make the room feel even messier.

So: we quickly decided that not only did we have to cut down on the textures, we also needed to tone down the colors.

Here's a very quick new version where I applied softer colors, and simply removed the floor texture for the time being:

Moving on, I started to sketch out the props we needed again, this time in color, to see whether the result would be harmonious or not. However, I wasn't sure what do do about the floor.

I had a couple of different ideas: either the floor would continue to consist of simple floor tiles, this time in a less hypnotizing pattern, OR the floor could be some kind of dirt instead, giving the dungeon a more natural feel:

As I showed the sketches to Fred and Teddy (they're amazing for understanding even half of what I mean with sketches like these) I came up with a third idea. What if the floor wasn't that type of floor at all, but grass and nature altogether, similar to what we use in our outdoor areas?

I quickly made a sketch of this as well, showing it to my colleagues:

In the end our reasoning was that the more nature we could squeeze in, the cooler it would make the dungeon and the rooms. My job now was to create this floor (and its paths) to see how it'd work in actual graphics and not just very unclear sketches. Starting out with the middle part of the room, here's my take on the floor using the grass-sketch as my "guide":

Obviously, I haven't made any props to go with it yet, but so far we're quite happy with the design, and it's likely this will be the type of floor we'll be using in the dungeon.

What do you think? Yay nor Nay to more nature in the dungeon? :)