HOW CAN I IMPROVE MY MAPS ?

Your classroom interiors seem really wide and vast. If you go into a class room it usually takes a couple of paces to go across the width. Classrooms are usually built to narrow the students so they're not looking to their right/left to look at the teacher. Basically make them less wide.

Your exteriors make no sense to me I cannot tell if it's a world map or even an area I can recognize. If it's a world map, make the roads way smaller so they take up 1 or 2 tiles in width. If it's a suburb or some kind of city make actual buildings that take up the blocks. Also there's a lot of inconsistent props (cacti, palm trees, regular trees all in the same area?). Consistency would be nice to establish the climate.

I think overall you need to be efficient with your space, and think about how long it takes to get from point a to point b.

You need to establish at least a semi-consistent sense of scale. As a general rule, a tile is about two to three feet (about two thirds of a meter to a meter).

How big is a classroom in real life? It's not as big as yours. There's not enough space between the desks to fit one and a half more desks. There's barely enough to walk between. Make it so only every other column of desks has an empty row in between it - the students will still be able to get out that way. The area for the professor is also ridiculously huge, it's the size of an auditorium stage. He only needs about a single row of 3-5 tiles up there, tops. Plus, for coherency reasons, the player should be able to see the chalkboard and the back row of desks at the same time. Try to fit a single room on a single screen when you can.

Don't increase the vertical space - decrease that too. Get rid of empty tiles. If tiles are redundant and samey then start putting different things on them. For example, give the students' desks different notebooks, binders, books, etc. sitting on top of them.

Your outdoor maps are horrible, sorry, I think you will just need to delete them and start over. Pick either overworld map scale or normal scale and stick with it. I know you have... seen cities in video games before, right? Find a modern video game that you like the outdoor segments of, and try to mimic how it lays the areas out. It doesn't have to be an RPG. You don't need RPG style five-building towns if you don't want them. Maybe you want to do it like old adventure games, having a list of buildings you can travel between, and when you choose one from the list you show up outside the building. Maybe you want to do it like Persona, showing what looks almost like a satellite view of the entire city at once, giving the player a tiny cursor they can walk through the streets with. All I know is that you definitely don't want to do it the way you're doing it now.

When making maps, smaller is always better. If you can make something smaller without affecting the core of the map's design, make it smaller. If you have open space, remove it unless your map is supposed to be spacious. If you think your map is small enough, make it smaller still because chances are you're still drawing your maps too big.

LockeZ's maps came out good because they're trying to be as small as realistically possible. You may think large maps are overall better, but they really aren't. Large maps lack detail, lack substance, and are bland.

When your room doesn't take up your entire screen - which, I'll point out, should really be the case in every single indoor map in your game - the black area is used to fill in the rest.

If the map goes up to the edge of the screen, and you don't have black area around it, that is a cue to players that walking to the edge of the map will take you to another map. If that's not the case in your maps (and even moreso if it's the case in some of your maps but not others), you are confusing the players.

author=Jude
Speaking of black area in maps, I have this weird peeve where every map I make has to have a ten tile buffer so that the player sprite is always centered, rather than the camera getting stuck on edges.

That is something to keep in mind.

Alright, so here are a few tips.
1 - Never underestimate the wall overlap technique. This makes your map look more realistic. You're looking at the map at a 3/4-ish view, so you won't be able to see what is directly behind the walls. Most walls are 2 tiles high, so there are 2 tiles worth of space behind them, hiding things from you.

2 - Shift Mapping. Holding Shift while placing auto tiles allows you to place the middle tile instead of the outer ones. This helps with edging issues, like with your carpets, how the design on the edges makes the carpet look like it's oddly cut. (Most carpets being square or rectangular.) Holding Shift while placing the carpet tile will make it look more like the red carpet has been thrown over the peach one.
The second part of Shift Mapping is this: When holding Shift you can copy an exact tile and if you hold Shift while placing it, it will remain the same. Shift+Right mouse click to copy, Shift+Left mouse click to place. This helps out a lot with autotile placement too.

3 - Learn how to conserve space. Give a rough estimate to your tiles and stick by them. I tend to think of tiles as equal to two steps. Others have different measurements. The deal is to make it consistent. Also, outsides vs inners. Make a concentrated effort to make them at least consistently the same size each time. (I like to make insides about 2x the sizes of the houses outer shell. It gives me room and helps when scaling all areas.)

4 - Don't decorate for decorations' sake. It's okay to break this rule sometimes, but putting pots and flowers and shit all over just to take up room means that you have too much room. You'll see in my rendition of your maps what I mean.

5 - Keep in mind what the map is supposed to be and what is needed in it. Also, for inners, the people who live there and their personalities. If a Carpenter runs a shop inside his house he'll have carpentry tools around. If you have a sailor or fisherman they'll have fishing and sailing equipment indoors. If a bachelor, not likely to be flowers and cute stuff around.

6 - A bed for everyone! Or at least allude to it. If you have a house with a three person family, unless they are very, very close they won't just have one bed between them. You could have doors on walls that are locked or just won't open to show that there are other rooms to a house if you don't want to expand the inners too much, but remember the people who live in the house need to have places to sleep too.

7 - The outside =/= the inside. If you're trying to make an outside that is the same size as your inside it will come off looking very dull and bad most of the time. (There are cases of this working, but not often and not likely with the RTP tiles.)

8 - Nature vs nurture. Nature is hectic, wild and untamed. The farther you go into lands that are unexplored, the less likely bushes, trees and flowers will line up in rows. Cliffs should not be unbroken lines, water should not be a long straight one-tile river, paths will not be just straight lines and grass does not grow in 3x3 clumps. Make things more random.
Whereas in towns you will usually find more structure. Gardens, while in some cases still a bit random, will usually be more carefully planned. Trees are found in rows, grass either mowed or cared for and streets run usually in straight lines.

A way to get better: Study/look at other maps in 2D commercial games. Not 3D games - they have more graphical shit to work with. Also, try to practice by recreating maps that you like in the maker. Experiment with things and find out what looks good and what doesn't.

Also, asking for input is a great idea. Good job~

Now, map edits:
I did a bit of cut and paste (it's pretty choppy) but you can see that the size is quite reduced. Mainly I added some overlapping aspects in the bedroom and kitchen, got rid of a line of plants and a box (dunno why they were there anyway) and make things cosier.


As for the school, two versions:

First one I got rid of the plants because unless this is a class about plants they weren't needed. This freed up some room to enclose a bit and added and extra window.

The second one I made it 3x4 instead and made the bookshelves at the back of the room as though overlapped by the wall. The setup looks a lot better in my opinion. Also, what's with the yellow poster?