Need help with sister tileset to "Old city" by Brian Lehmann

So I'm working on this level where I try to experiment with different tilesets and gradients, try to match them together and such. This area of the level focuses on Egomassive's "Savanna" tileset, and one of the screens ended up like this:


In this one I've included a house design from Brian Lehmann's "Old city"-tileset:


I really liked the look of this and it fits well with the story of the level, but I felt that this wasn't a desolate house somewhere, I needed to create a town in the same style. But that is very difficult to do with above tileset, the details are neat but it isn't very versitile.

So I set out to create a sister tileset that was more versitile to use when creating my town, but I'm struggling with it.. Here it is in its current state:


There are many things I'm not happy with, here's an example screen:


I think this looks incredibly dull, the ground and background textures are simply awful, but I can't figure out something that fits with the theme.

So I'm looking for feedback, any help would be appretiated. Also ideas of what to remove and add would be helpful.  

Hmm. My first thought was that the outlines are too dark in your tileset, which muddies the look of it somewhat (and may make it hard to tell between what's in the foreground and background). Also, you should probably make the bricks a little wider, so as to match the ones in Orion's tileset better. I hope that helps.

I dabbled with the tilesets, tried to make a convincing dense city. The original set is weird, like a Nurakabe creation, in that it's hard to understand how the pieces fit together or what they're meant to be. Here is what I think:

• My first issue is a flaw in the original set where the shadow on the eve of the house meets the shadow on the left side of the house. The shadow's darkness doubles giving an artifact when you try to make a house with a left wall more than one tile high.
• It would be nice to have a gable peak so that you can make gables that are an odd width in tiles.
• The dirt pattern is too bright and busy. Turn down the saturation and the contrast in colors. Also, the middle distance should be in the middle of your foreground and your background in color and brightness.

Something I've done to help me figure out how to make a city tileset work was to find photographs of actual cities. By studying the real thing I formed a better understanding of the image I was trying to convey. Once I could clearly see it in my mind, I could draw it.