I've been replaying the Gurk games recently, and got inspired to design something similar. Started with EGA, but then switched to the C64 colors. Here is what I have now. Right now I am still motivated to try and make a game out of it.

I introduced some new variations of the already existing tiles, some new overlays for roads and multiple tile elements.

I am not sure about the water tiles. Any ideas?

For the encounters, I thought that small vignettes would look much more interesting then the simple icons of a creature. Originally went with free drawings but then stumbled upon a screenshot of the Wolf Rock encouter in Magic Candle and fell in love with the concept.

I placed the combats on full pic maps instead of tiled ones. Added some new elements like dynamic starting positions, combat area limitations and map assets.

Thanks NancyGold.

Interesting observation about the roads. Although due to other reasons, I changed the tiles int he meantime:

I upped the saturation of the colours ar well, those will be washed out a bit in the final product, as a monochrome black semi-transparent overlay will be added to it to enhance the pixelated look:

I grew fond of the water tiles for a while now, so I will probably leave them as they are.

I am struggling with the vignettes right now. I think the sprites and backgrounds are nicely readable on their own:

But merge into another if overlayed, even though the sprites do have a pixel-wide outline:

Any ideas ho to solve this?

> But merge into another if overlayed, even though the sprites do have a pixel-wide outline:

Part of the issue is that you have the characters' legs aligning with where the background props and buildings start, the tangent makes them read as part of the background. Moving the characters down a few pixels would help a lot, I think. It'll also help give the scene more depth, since the characters will look like they're standing on the ground in the scene and not right by the walls.

The larger issue is that the busiest part of the background is also the part where you're putting the characters. Ideally, the background should be designed to leave low-detail or low-contrast space where the characters are. That doesn't mean the entire middle third needs to be low-detail - you can choose a few spots where you'll place characters most of the time, and have detail between those spots.